Cycles of Persecution
An encounter during a routine bloodletting forced me to confront a suddenly darker world
I was in a cheerful mood going in for my phlebotomy that afternoon, that is until the nurse started with her prying questions.
It was my first time in this clinic, and it was just the two of us in a windowless room at back of the hospital’s infusion center. I was sitting in a recliner awaiting my procedure while the nurse sat perched on a stool looking intently at her computer screen. Every so often, she would steal little glances at me.
She was in her mid-fifties, with blondish-brown hair, and a bit country. Around her wrist was a tattoo of a bracelet with three chains dangling off, each with something attached. On one was a cross, on another an anchor, and whatever was on the third, I couldn’t make out.
In any case, she made me nervous. Her eyes kept shifting from the screen to me, to the screen, and back to me again where they finally settled and narrowed.
Is Michael your … um … decision maker? she asked.
Ahem. Yes, I said. He’s my husband.
Oh, she said.
