Blood Draw

I had been dreading Monday for two weeks, not only because of the ending weekend but also because of my appointment. The whole drive not even the news could take my mind off the impending doom no matter how depressing it was. I pulled into the parking lot which was unusually empty. Yes, I’d never been there before and had low expectations but I didn’t expect the parking lot to be deserted. Was this place either so good no one could get in or so bad everyone stayed away.

 I figured I’d find out and walked out of my car. As I entered the parking elevator, the first thing I noticed was the smell. It smelled like a mixture of hand sanitizer and compost. Like someone tried to sanitize the elevator maybe three years ago. The second thing I noticed was the rust in every corner was a spider web encased in a golden chamber of rust. The buttons on the elevator were covered in dust and one of them had some sort of goo on it, luckily I wasn’t going to level 3. 

When the elevator doors opened I was let out into a dirty waiting room. At the front of the room was a desk sitting behind was a lady with blonde ringlets. Her desk was the only clean thing in the room and it was obvious that she was doing her best to keep that cheeky smile on her face. She seemed young but older than me maybe mid thirties. I approached her desk. 

She smiled way too wide showing all of her teeth and said “Hi sweetie” with a strong southern accent. I told her I was there for a routine blood draw and she said that I wasn’t in her computer but she could make room. Duh, there was no one there. I checked my watch I had thirty minutes before I needed to be at work. 

“How long will this take?” I asked.

 “Oh, about an hour.” she said cheerfully. 

“I need to leave in a half hour will it really take that long?” I inquired questioning that a blood draw would take so long. 

“Okay sweetie calm down there’s no need to start a kerfuffle. I’ll ask the doctor to go as quickly as possible.” I nodded and waited for the doctor.

 When the doctor came out I immediately wished I wasn’t seeing what I was. The doctor, a very tall man, had an incredibly long beard filled with specks of food and dirt. It looked like he’d dragged it around the subway ground. In his left hand was the dirtiest mirror I’ve ever seen and in his right was a long syringe filled with green fluid. The needle was probably 8 inches long and was so dirty it almost looked like a porcupine quill. 

The doctor came over and introduced himself as Dr. Peters. He then asked me to sit down on a gurney a nurse with a tight ponytail and way too many wrinkles was pushing towards me.

When I did, Dr. Peters put the needle to my arm. “Wait!” I screamed “This doesn’t seem right, I’m here for a blood draw!” Dr. Peters jammed the needle all the way into my arm before I could pull away. My whole arm was on fire with a searing pain that made me clench my jaw so hard I cracked one of my teeth. 

Suddenly the searing stopped, and so did the rest of the feeling in my body, I fell back onto the gurney. The nurse and doctor wheeled me through double doors and into an operating room. I couldn’t move but could hear and see everything. From my limited vision I could see that the room was just as dirty as the rest of the hospital. 

The light above the gurney I was on had a spider crawling on it and looked like it hadn’t been turned on in years. When I looked over I realized that without feeling it, Dr. Peters had been cutting a port like hole into my chest. Into this hole, he inserted a tube which quickly began gushing some sort of fluid into my chest. My entire body began shaking. 

“Now just relax” the nurse said as she put a mask over my nose. I immediately began feeling dizzy. 

Then everything went BLACK.