Free The Making of a Nurse by Tilda Shalof Page A

and everyone called each other by their first names. Every patient had to have blood tests before seeing the doctor. Aviva Shofet was one of the senior nurses in the clinic and she taught me how to draw blood and start IVS and soon I got pretty good at it. It was a thrill to see the tinyspeck of blood, called the “flashback,” in the plastic sheath of the angiocath. It was the surest sign I was in the vein. I discovered that the best way to locate a “difficult vein” was by touch and sometimes I even closed my eyes to feel for it. I learned the secret, idiosyncratic places in patients’ arms and hands where the best veins were hidden. First I got to know a patient’s veins, and then I got to know the patient.
    One day an entire platoon of new soldiers came to the clinic. They weren’t sick, but they needed routine blood tests before Basic Training. That day I palpated hundreds of “antecubital spaces” – the soft place inside the bend in the arm – where easy, obvious veins are often found. One soldier boasted how tough he was, that he had seen it all, but he cringed when I drew his blood and looked like he was about to faint. He could take everything, he claimed – except the sight of blood.
    Aviva drew my attention to a number circled on one soldier’s chart. It was his medical profile, she explained, but even the most virile, healthy-looking male specimens could only achieve a ninety-seven out of one hundred. “They can never get one hundred. Do you know why?” she asked with a grin, knowing that I did not. “They’re all circumcised, which is a surgical procedure, so they get three points knocked off the top – so to speak – right away.”
    Children, even infants, were brought to that clinic, and Aviva explained that if they were upset and crying, it was actually the best time to swiftly slip in a needle because their veins bulged out and were easier to visualize. So, when tiny baby Adi, who was just six months old, was brought in to the clinic screaming in her mother’s arms, I gritted my teeth, steeled myself, and nailed that vein, as slender as a single silken thread. Aviva nodded her approval.
Here I am, taking care of kids with cancer
, I praised myself.
See, my mind can trump my emotions when necessary
.
    After they had their blood drawn, the patients waited to see the doctor, who would examine them and review the results of those tests. Meanwhile, the nurses began the treatments that usually involved chemotherapy, antibiotics, and/or blood transfusions. An astonishing array of patients came to us in that tiny clinic.
    A Bedouin shepherd arrived for his chemotherapy, directly from tending his sheep. He had dark skin and a bushy white moustache that curled up at the ends. He wore the traditional
keffiyah
wrapped around his head and rested his walking stick made from the branch of an olive tree against the wall. As he sat down, ancient dust and biblical sand billowed up from the folds of his caftan. When I looked out the window, I identified his “vehicle”: tied to a post in the parking lot was a donkey swishing its tail.
    A cultured Romanian woman was nervous. Her veins were deep in her fleshy arms, but I managed to find a tiny blue one, hidden on the inner aspect of her pale forearm. When she smiled weakly in thanks to me, I noticed her bleeding gums and I knew I would likely be transfusing her with platelets later that day.
    Twenty-one-year-old Talia had completed her army service and had just been accepted to law school, but on a hiking trip in the Galilee with friends, after climbing Mount Gilboa, she had noticed bruises along her arms and legs. She was diagnosed with a rare disease called aplastic anemia, a complete malfunction of the bone marrow and only a transplant could save her life. Luckily, her sister was a close and willing match.
    Amos was a brilliant scientist, specializing in cellular biology, who was diagnosed with leukemia. I asked him what it was like to know so much about