Blood Test.

I hovered on the verandah of the cottage before pressing the intercom button. After hello's, the high tinny voice issuing out of the speaker asked “Blood test?” I agreed that was why I was there and a slight buzzing sound announced the unlocking of the door. The hallway was as blank as possible, with a depressing, amateur looking sign announcing ‘Waiting Room', pointing to a doorway ten paces away. I was reaching for the pile of well thumbed, outdated magazines when the nurse called me back to the front room, where the bloodletting was to take place.

I acted casual and normal, the type of person who isn't bothered by blood tests. I sat in the swivel chair beside the arm restraining device - a curve of plastic with bandage padding, and tried not to feel too worried about the number of vials the nurse was collecting. Seven tubes of varied size were lined up in a pencil holder like device, waiting to be filled with o-positive. Whilst the nurse fiddled around with my arm in preparation for the spiking I looked around the room; a television positioned in front of a bricked up fireplace was transmitting a children's program. When I felt the itch of the needle I stared at the pink creature with a head like a hamburger bun, dancing behind a wall of faint static on the screen. I felt conscious that I was displaying too much interest in a child's program on which the sound had been turned down to a barely audible level, and gave a small ‘oh how funny' smile.

“Are you ok?” the nurse asked, changing over to the second vial with a dull snap. I thought I should be talking, but couldnít think of anything to strike up a conversation about. The room was depressing, it had once been grand and Victorian, but had been renovated and decorated in a basic, cheap style. There was nothing except the hamburger head to comment on, and I was now too worried to say anything about it. White prickles had started to crawl over my vision, so everything looked as veiled as the television picture. I concentrated on trying to banish the white prickles, sweep them off my vision.

“Are you ok?” she asked again, and I admitted that I felt rather faint. “Only three more to go,” she said. I felt desperate. The white prickles were darkening, and although I was struggling to prevent it happening, I could hardly see anything. “I can't see anything!” I said urgently, as I heard the snap of the final tube attaching to the needle in my arm. The nurse made worried but soothing noises, and I repeated my cry again, this time more desperately. The room had disappeared and was replaced by a churning black image, shifting lumps of coal. “What's your friend's name?” she asked, and gasped “Tim” before I felt her take the needle out of my arm and I lost consciousness.

Tim had been reading an old Who Weekly in the waiting room, a celebrity scandal story, when he heard his name being yelled from the blood taking room. “She is too heavy for me,” the nurse said, referring to my inert body in the swivel chair. Tim was terrified by my blank eyes half rolled back in my head and my strange, stiff posture, thinking I had suffered some kind of terrible fit and it was The End.

At this time I was buried in the churning coal bucket, with a terrible blood rushing sound in my ears, so I could hear none of this exchange. When I woke up Tim was holding my pink and white socked ankles so my legs were elevated, looking incredibly concerned. I didn't really mean to, but I grinned, in the same way that in times of horror I feel like laughing. The nurse was fanning me vigorously with a sheaf of A4 paper, which seemed surreal and stupid. I felt disconnected with my fainting body, as if it had played a trick on me. The next few minutes were spent reacquainting myself with the ugly room, the photocopied guides to sticking ecg discs on chests, the fuzzy television, the sparse furnishings. The nurse held a cup to my lips and I drank from it, relishing the sensation as I couldn't think of any time when this had happened to me before in a medical capacity. She looked upset by my dramatic loss of consciousness, I immediately felt guilty for inflicting my heavy, inert body into her Thursday morning. She rustled in the cupboard and gave me a yellow jelly snakefrom a crinkly packet, which I obediently chomped into.

I was proud of my true faint, it joins the list of other famous fainting incidents: visiting my grandfather in intensive care when I was fourteen and collapsing into all the life support machinery (thankfully nothing was disrupted), and fainting in the living room and toppling a giant jar of capsicums which smashed and covered me with stinking brine.

Although the actual act of fainting is intensely unpleasant, especially when someone is extracting blood and telling you to stay conscious because there's only two more tubes to go, I am also proud of my fainting stories. Fainting is a strange, fey phenomenon, I like to think that I go somewhere else in the unconscious moments.

After I had recovered enough to stand the nurse remembered something important she had neglected to do. She looked over the desk until she found a round band aid and stuck it in the crook of my arm, over where she had inserted the needle. These band aids are more psychological than anything else, as I could barely see where she had put the needle, and I definitely wasn't dripping blood. The small round band aid is like a badge, and I purposefully left it on for as long as possible, even when the edges began to get grubby. I liked its distracting appearance in the middle of my arm and I hoped other people would notice it and ask me about it so I could tell my fainting story (no one did.)