One of Cups, Six of Needles

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I had to hike down to the doctor's office very early today to give urine and blood samples for various tests. Joy. It took over an hour for the blood for 4 different vials to be drawn since I have evil tiny veins in my arm and low blood pressure in spite of having a salt lick at my desk. They've always been like this and I usually have to hope that the nurse won't resort to the veins in my hand which are much easier to tap, but much more painful. It tends to keep the vampires at bay but now I look like a hardcore heroin shooter with bruises and holes.

The interesting part about the urine sample drug screen is that everyone on the management/HR foodchain at work not only asked me multiple times if it was acceptable, but the nurse today even seemed apologetic. It's SOP in the US for most jobs involving computers, root and responsibility, so it didn't register on my radar at all. I was just grumpy about having to be within 100 feet of a medical office, especially when hungry, needing to pee and lacking enough coffee to make me vaguely human. I'm told the test isn't that common here yet, but it was rather curious to see how involved in the process you are made to be from watching the sample be prepared for transport, labelled, numbered and sealed in the packet destined for the lab and, if I understood correctly, I will also have to personally deliver the results of the analysis to HR. In the US, you pee in the cup and cruise on down the road never to hear of it again or so you hope.

While I was chatting with the pokémon hunting for a vein I noticed that among the vials, usually colour coded and labelled with an acronym, was an HIV screen. I've worked with human liver cells before and had regular HIV and HEP A/B screens fairly regularly so it didn't really bother me, but I thought it was an interesting contrast where the drug test is seen as an intrusion of privacy but the unannounced HIV screen was not. The US is the complete opposite as HIV screens are an extremely sensitive issue, voluntary and often anonymous. I think the blood tests are part of an overall full medical examination that I'm rather glad to have since it has been a really long time since I've had a physical and now that I'm getting older, maybe it's not such a bad idea to visit a doctor once in a while.