Eew, yuck, medical stuff
I feel light-headed
I was a pretty involved student during my high school years. Like Max Fischer in Rushmore, I believed in the benefits of a well-rounded education and the importance of making a name for oneself. Now, whether or not I succeeded in those endeavors depends on who you ask.
I enjoyed taking on extracurricular activities as it provided me with several creative outlets, social interactions, and opportunities to lead. Student government was just one of those many activities and part of my job as a member of the SGA was to work at the school-wide blood drive.
Those that know me best know that I am both extremely squeamish around anything medical and extremely sympathetic when I see (or even hear about) someone passing out.1
I hate needles.
I hate blood draws.
I even hate having my blood pressure taken, because I hate the feeling of my own pulse.
I hate listening to people tell their medical stories.
That’s why I volunteered to work the registration table in the hallway outside of the gym. I didn’t want to see all those people giving blood. I thought by giving myself a buffer, I would be safe. But then Melissa walked out.
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She had finished donating and strode out of the gym, cookie in one hand, a juice in the other. And then she hit the floor right in front of me like a bag of rocks
I instantly felt flush in the face and a wave of dizziness came over me as teachers rushed over to help Melissa. My heart raced and my blood pressure dropped. I was feeling faint too and for a moment I thought I might be joining Melissa on the floor.
Bleh. Even typing this is making me feel uneasy.
That’s why the Universe thought it hilarious when, six years later, a videographer hired me to monitor Video Village while he captured footage in a hospital operating room. His client wanted an instructional video for their medical students and so he and I spent the entire day filming cardiac catheterizations.
Now, I was pleased to find out (during our pre-production meeting) that wouldn’t actually have to look at each procedure. The videographer would fall on that grenade. He would be perched, camera on tripod, above the doctors, staring down at the patient, filming the procedures in their entirety.
My job, was to monitor both the feed from the videographer’s camera, the feed from the medical camera, make notes in the shot log (with timecode), ensure that the backup tapes were recording, and swap out tapes when needed. And boy, you better believe that I positioned my station so that my back was facing the doctors and patients. But even with that, just the fact that I was in the OR, very close to the action, I was still filled with anxiety.
But that wasn’t the end of my exposure to all things medical in my career. Hardly.
I had to run camera for a convention of dental hygienists where, during one session, the entire room of attendees split up into pairs and injected each other with Novocain to practice a new, “painless” technique.
I worked with a Producer on a video highlighting a corporate award recipient who gave back to his community by donating blood regularly, which meant we had to follow him to his local blood drive and film him as he donated.
I worked on a Discovery Health reality show, filming a family with sextuplets. And it just so happened that on one day of the shoot, I was responsible for filming each of the six children as they received their school vaccinations from the pediatrician.
An ad agency who hired me regularly just so happened to have a lot of health care clients in their portfolio.
And when I decided to accept an offer with my current full time employer (which also happens to be a healthcare non-profit) one of my first assignments was to film an assessment triage appointment, consisting of… you guessed it… a blood draw.
I’ve come a long way in the last 15 years. Yes I still lie down whenever I’m having my own blood drawn, but I’m able to perform my daily job functions, filming patients in a hospital, without any anxiety.
Life is funny sometimes. It has a way of throwing you into situations you would never venture into voluntarily. And so it was with me and my uneasiness around medical procedures. But it’s in those moments that you learn a lot about yourself; your resiliency and your adaptability.
We need that in our lives and careers; moments that challenge us, forcing us to face the uncomfortable, shaping us into something better; helping us up the ladder of self-improvement, one rung at a time, when we otherwise wouldn’t have dared to even start climbing.
Because when you’re lying on the ground after passing out, you have nowhere else to go but up.
Once, while driving, I had to pull over and compose myself because I started feeling faint. I had been listening to a podcast about the Lance Armstrong doping scandal and all the talk about needles, IV bags, and blood transfusions made me incredibly light-headed.