When you have dry riverbeds for veins, every blood draw becomes potential medieval torture, a moment to dread for days in advance. You desperately irrigate yourself with entire reservoirs of bottled water in the hours leading up to the lancing, and you hope that you have the most talented of phlebotomists to mercifully extract those few vials needed to gauge your overall fate, your continued existence. You clench and grit and apologize in advance for being such "a hard stick." Maybe make a feeble quip about how you'd be a poor junkie. You hope the butterfly needle gets deployed since that's apparently especially good for such hard cases as yours. Fear gives way to agony if that first lancing is fruitless, and a different arm has to get stuck, maybe even resorting to going in through the wrist. When the vials finally fill and snap shut, and you press the bandage to the mined site, you can exhale and offer grateful thanks to the soul who liberated you from that dreadful chair and the needle. You walk away believing once again that there is nobody more worthy of acclaim and honor than a gifted phlebotomist.
