So I went back to have my blood drawn today, and again, they couldn’t find a vein in either arm (this should have been a hint). So the tech asked if it would be okay to tap a vein on the back of my hand instead. Sure, I said, fig­ur­ing we were still talk­ing about a tiny nee­dle and less than 1% of my total blood vol­ume, what could go wrong?

She had me make a fist and inserted the nee­dle while I care­fully stud­ied the mar­ket­ing stick­ers on the office laser printer. Then the stick­ers started get­ting… well, not fuzzy, really, but more like I was look­ing at every­thing through a white screen or really thin gauze.

Then my hear­ing went. I’m already par­tially deaf, but I can hear pretty well in a quiet room. This was like like sud­denly I was wear­ing earplugs and just lost 20db across the board.

Cue the water works. I started sweat­ing, a cold sweat that soon made me look like I just got out of the pool. And now my vision’s get­ting worse, the gauze is get­ting thicker.

I let the tech­ni­cian know what’s going on and she wraps up as best she can (she noticed that not only did I get very pale, but the flow of blood into the tube started really slow­ing down). Then I scarf down three glasses of water and go lie down on the X-​Ray table, notic­ing that the wall next to me is filled with star charts, of all things. After ten min­utes or so my senses come back to full strength and I feel strong enough to stand, thank the tech­ni­cian and go home.

This is the first time I’ve ever gone into shock. I often get woozy when hav­ing blood drawn (there’s some­thing fun­da­men­tally not right about vol­un­teer­ing to have some­one tap your cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem and wait patiently while you pump your very life fluid out of your body) but this was dif­fer­ent. I don’t know if it was the dehy­dra­tion or unusual point of with­drawal or what, but I can def­i­nitely say I don’t rec­om­mend it.