By now its no news that I have a PICCLine in my right arm. But yesterday it became the key player in another example of mindless protocol in healthcare. With healthy quantitites of blood being drawn at least three times a week, without the PICCLine I would be subjected to a phemonenal quantity of needle sticks. So, its been inserted for convenience. All this was explained to the tech assigned the duty of  drawing my blood yesterday. He felt there was something I didn’t understand, he only drew blood with a finger prick.

“Why?”I asked.

“Because thats how it is done here,” he said.

I asked him what the point of the double lumen, 18 gauge tube running through a vein in my arm to my heart. He just shrugged his shoulders, smiled and pricked my finger.

Mindless protocol. Maybe he was unqualified to draw blood from a PICC, maybe he was to lazy to grab a nurse, or more likely this is just what this specific tech does and what he has always done and will continue to do. He’s a guy who draws blood from a finger. Period.

This may seem like a hissy fit. You may think, oh please Matt, they had to draw your blood anyway who cares where its from. But its inefficient. The PICC is there, the radiologist who placed it charged a hefty price, might as well take advantage. Instead there is another puncture to get infected, another site for my precious blood cells to spill out, another place my dwindling platelets rush to clot.

You learn from your mistakes; this will not happen again. If I’m going to lose blood its going to be from my PICCLine, unless I’m presented with reasonable, relevant, scientific-based evidence that it should not be.

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