Tilting tubes

I didn’t need to be prompted to ask questions of the second nurse. I needed to know when to pick up the test results, where to pick them up, how much they would cost, all that stuff. She didn’t have many of the answers, but telling me what she did know took all the time required for the blood sampling. "Is that it?" I was surprised. One tube only? When they had drawn blood for benchmark testing in France, I had lain there for four tubes’ worth and thought I would pass out by the fourth in spite of my horizontal position.

"Different countries do it different ways," explained the nurse. She was relieved that I hadn’t created any untoward problems. "We do all the tests with this one tube."

"Fine," I thought. Better for me. Hope the accuracy isn’t adversely affected. Driving back home, still feeling a bit queasy, I wondered how I would ever get the nerve to do a full-scale facelift if just one tube’s worth of blood threw me into absolute tilt.