Kaiser's Physical

Mary and I had been married for a few years when I had an episode during a physical at a Kaiser office. This time I probably had a hand at training a young nurse in the art of listening to the patient. The setup is the typical blood draw for a physical. The nurse has taken my basic history and in the course of that let me know that this was her first job out of school. I let her know about my special issues with needles and she immediately got very nervous. This was great. I'm nervous about the whole needle thing and the likely aftermath and now she's nervous about it.

She promised to be gentle and take care of me, yada yada yada, but I was still sitting in a chair. She stuck me not too badly, took a couple of tubes of blood and the bandaid went over the little hole. I woke up on a gurney. The best I could tell is I passed out and fell out of the chair and it took the two or three nurses to get me on the gurney. I was looking up at the young nurse crying and telling an older nurse that the next time somebody said they would pass out she would really believe them.

I'm thinking this is about the time the training started to change where nurses actually listen to patients, but it took a while for it to make its way through all the schools in the nation.