anything out, he had to check and double-check the blood type on the bags against the order form, and sometimes call the operating theaters to double-check. He explained to me that there were “at least four or six” different types of blood and that sending off the wrong type “could waste it by killing somebody,” and it troubled me that the two consequences were not entirely discrete within his mind.
When Claude slammed down the limp yellowy bags of blood plasma in bundles of three, I couldn’t help but think of the butcher shops that lined the Main Street of my hometown, and particularly of the meat counters where Mr. Knauer whumped down whatever my mother’s note requested before sending me back home to help administer dinner to my family. Near the end of his shift, it was Claude’s job to discard any unused thawed bags, which amounted to gallons and gallons of blood, down the hazardous-materials chute, where they would be incinerated along with the rest of the day’s medical rubbish. It seemed a waste to me, and I commented on what a shame it was that good-hearted citizens had gone out of their way to donate the blood that he was heaving by the armload into the Dumpster.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Claude said with genuine sensitivity. “It’s mostly just bums doing it for the cookie.”
The guys at the blood bank were infamous for hitting on pharmacy runners, so I wasn’t particularly flattered when Claude developed a crush on me. “When I heard that bunch of ambulances come in I started hoping that I would see you down here,” he told me one day when I arrived with an order, prompting me to mention my fictitious art-student boyfriend, whom I had mentally rendered in detail for use on just such occasions.
“If you’ve got a boyfriend, why are you working here?” Claude asked, and it dawned on me that his understanding of the relationship between the sexes was undoubtedly deeper than mine. I made the excuse that artists are generally penniless, even when they are gorgeous and wear a sort of troubled look strikingly reminiscent of a certain photograph of Ted Williams at bat during the 1941 All-Star Game.
“Oh, so he needs you to buy pot for him,” Claude said with what might or might not have been sarcasm, and I couldn’t think of a comeback with which to defend my imaginary boyfriend, so I let it slide.
I took to working the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift and made a point of being there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, to shoot and then deliver a cart of “drop bags” to the psychiatric ward. These were saline-based intravenous medications containing a sedative called droperidol, to be used as anesthesia during electroconvulsive therapy, known by caregivers as “ECT” and misunderstood by the public to be “shock treatments.” Twice a week, patients were readied in the early-morning hours and settled onto gurneys, and then lined up in the hallway to wait their turn for the procedure. One by one, each patient was drawn into a quiet room where a team of doctors and nurses administered electrical stimulation to one side of the head while carefully monitoring vital signs; all the while the patient was awash in the anesthesia I had brought.
Accordingly, Wednesdays and Fridays were noticeably better days in the ward, when many of the patients who had previously seemed dead in all but body could be found sitting up, dressed in their street clothes. Some could even briefly look me in the eye. In contrast, Sundays and Mondays were the worst days in the ward, when patients rocked and scratched themselves or moaned while lying in bed, cared for by nurses who seemed both supremely capable and acutely helpless.
The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these
When Claude slammed down the limp yellowy bags of blood plasma in bundles of three, I couldn’t help but think of the butcher shops that lined the Main Street of my hometown, and particularly of the meat counters where Mr. Knauer whumped down whatever my mother’s note requested before sending me back home to help administer dinner to my family. Near the end of his shift, it was Claude’s job to discard any unused thawed bags, which amounted to gallons and gallons of blood, down the hazardous-materials chute, where they would be incinerated along with the rest of the day’s medical rubbish. It seemed a waste to me, and I commented on what a shame it was that good-hearted citizens had gone out of their way to donate the blood that he was heaving by the armload into the Dumpster.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Claude said with genuine sensitivity. “It’s mostly just bums doing it for the cookie.”
The guys at the blood bank were infamous for hitting on pharmacy runners, so I wasn’t particularly flattered when Claude developed a crush on me. “When I heard that bunch of ambulances come in I started hoping that I would see you down here,” he told me one day when I arrived with an order, prompting me to mention my fictitious art-student boyfriend, whom I had mentally rendered in detail for use on just such occasions.
“If you’ve got a boyfriend, why are you working here?” Claude asked, and it dawned on me that his understanding of the relationship between the sexes was undoubtedly deeper than mine. I made the excuse that artists are generally penniless, even when they are gorgeous and wear a sort of troubled look strikingly reminiscent of a certain photograph of Ted Williams at bat during the 1941 All-Star Game.
“Oh, so he needs you to buy pot for him,” Claude said with what might or might not have been sarcasm, and I couldn’t think of a comeback with which to defend my imaginary boyfriend, so I let it slide.
I took to working the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift and made a point of being there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, to shoot and then deliver a cart of “drop bags” to the psychiatric ward. These were saline-based intravenous medications containing a sedative called droperidol, to be used as anesthesia during electroconvulsive therapy, known by caregivers as “ECT” and misunderstood by the public to be “shock treatments.” Twice a week, patients were readied in the early-morning hours and settled onto gurneys, and then lined up in the hallway to wait their turn for the procedure. One by one, each patient was drawn into a quiet room where a team of doctors and nurses administered electrical stimulation to one side of the head while carefully monitoring vital signs; all the while the patient was awash in the anesthesia I had brought.
Accordingly, Wednesdays and Fridays were noticeably better days in the ward, when many of the patients who had previously seemed dead in all but body could be found sitting up, dressed in their street clothes. Some could even briefly look me in the eye. In contrast, Sundays and Mondays were the worst days in the ward, when patients rocked and scratched themselves or moaned while lying in bed, cared for by nurses who seemed both supremely capable and acutely helpless.
The first time that I entered through the double-locked doors of the psych ward I was terrified, believing for no real reason that such places harbored evil souls ready to assault me at any moment. But once inside I found it to be the slowest-moving place on Earth, and I saw that these
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