Ten years after heart surgery, blood work is still a challenge for me. Taking daily anticoagulant medication (blood thinners) requires blood monitoring every four weeks, and it’s my least favourite ritual. It keeps me feeling like a perennial patient.
Having sampled countless phlebotomists from all over the world, I’ve become an astute connoisseur in, well, The Art of Blood Extraction. After 120 mini-invasions into my vein over the past decade, I believe I’ve earned this distinction.
I’m a fierce data collector in the moments before a needle slides in: I observe how the technician enters the room. Are they yielding to the space around them or aggressively pushing through it? I watch how they handle the vials, how they grab my arm to tie the elastic armband, and how they apply the alcohol swab to that tender area on the underbelly of my arm. Is there eye contact? Are they distracted? What is the quality of their voice? And what does my intuition tell me? If I’m bracing and my heart is racing, the red flag goes up. The cumulative effect of these experiences has made me more sensitive and bold in equal measure.
If I sense something is amiss when I sit in The Chair, I’ll politely excuse myself and ask for another phlebotomist.
Blood extraction takes ten seconds, but my energetic data-gathering begins way before that.
I’ve learned a great deal about teaching through my experiences in the blood lab. The way I enter a yoga class, in no small measure, is informed by a decade of observing scores of phlebotomists. I want my students to feel the same way I’d like to feel when I enter a lab: safe, relaxed, trustful.
That process begins way before the first Namaste.
How do you move through your yoga practice? Through your daily life? How do you pick up a water glass or transition to triangle pose? Are you thumping your feet and aggressively “pushing air” with your body? Or, rather, as my friend and colleague Tara Judelle would ask, are you “gracefully painting space”?
Your movements send ripples through the fabric of the cosmos. They carry signals. When you notice that people feel relaxed and safe in your presence, this is a sign you are making progress on the path.
Ana de Madrid says
Wow Marc! I have just spent 7 days in hospital doing the same “bloodwork” you describe and, while it is new to me, a Yogini since 1998 (name for yoga adepts. correct? ) and a teacher wanting students!), I too looked apprehensively at the technicians jamming needles into my arm and wondering at their level of commitment! The best thing about those unexpected 27 days, starting in Emergency in Calgary Canada due to errythmia that caused something I’d never noted before – unmistakably swollen feet and ankles ( they didn’t even look like my feet the day I woke up at home and observed the unsuspected condition following 2 weeks of heavy coughing from some sort of virus!) , tge hidden “benefit” of my bad situation was that I voluntarily taught quite a few people a little yoga and how to meditate. All in the cardiac dept/, the meditation aspect plus a few simple poses really reached them- patients and young nurses alike! In my gown, taped to a heart m onitor they watched at the front desk 24/24, fortunately with my black tights underneath, I could do the famous Five Tibetans in the corridor, none too clean, and fascinate a future yogini with Half Moon. It was a blast, except for tiring me out heavily at 11 p,m, at night, but since one could not sleep anyway, with blood pressure and other checks being performed through the night, why not do some yoga and try to relax? I gather your problem is now well healed with all the great yoga you and your partner do all over the world? If I win the lottery, I would come to Nurenberg where my Swiss family took its roots, and to Greece I have always dreamed of seeing Yes! Let’s see if I can save up! Not sure how Tara Judelle found me to send me the e-mail today, 29 January 2019, but so glad she did! I know my heart problem has little or nothing to do with yoga!
NAMASTE Marc! Je suis interprète en espagnol et français et parle etwas Deutsch aussi, would LOVE to interpret your teachings in Barcelona., France, Switzerland, if ever I were that lucky ! KEEP WELL and HELLO to Tara!
Ana de Madrid
Marc Holzman says
thank you so much for your thoughtful response ana!