Each week I go to UConn twice. Once on Tuesdays do get my blood taken and once on Thursdays to get my chemo treatment. I have a port in my chest (I love my port and have had it for 6+ years as my veins have never been good) and so I need to have blood drawn in a sterilized fashion at the hospital on Tuesdays. My port has been working fine all of these years but you do have those days when it might be a little more difficult to get blood flow than other times.

In the past when this was the case, the nurse would ask you to cough, raise your arms, sing, and if those tricks didn’t work she would flip your recliner back so you were practically upside down in the chair. Usually blood would start to flow. Well on Tuesday, Petra, my nurse, accessed my port, flushed it with saline as usual and pulled back on the syringe expecting the red stuff. Nope. So I coughed, raised my arms, started singing to no avail. She tried another flush, no luck. Then she said, I need to take this needle out and re-access the port again.

We did that and 4 syringes of saline later, we finally got blood. As soon as Petra put the tubes in to collect the blood she said “start coughing and talking because nothing is coming out again”. Another saline and lots of conversation we finally got two tubes of blood.

When it was all said and done, we both looked down at the table of syringes and tubes and joked about how many things we had to use to get blood out of my port. I said, thank goodness I have met my deductible, as this could have been an extremely expensive blood draw.