Adventures in Ghetto Phlebotomy

I had my blood drawn today. No biggie, just some simple tests. Thing is, doctors can't seem to be bothered with this kind of menial gruntwork anymore. So they gave me a list of the tests they wanted done and send me off to a nearby "lab" on Beverly and Alvarado. I should have known I was in trouble when the directions they gave me included vagaries like "Well, it's a big brown building across the street from the donut shop." Of course there's no sign visible from the street.

I eventually managed to find the big brown building in question, which turned out to be a miserable 70s era ant-farm of low rent offices with bizarre, barely legible signs written in Spanish, Korean and Tagalog. It took me even longer to find the right door, because the lab I was looking for shared its tiny office suite with a fly-by-night insurance company. The insurance company got the bigger sign. At that point, life insurance was starting to sound like a pretty good idea.

After a disconcerting half an hour of sitting in a room the size of a portapotty, listening to someone on the other side of a plastic divider drone on about bodily injury and uninsured motorists in a thick Filipino accent, I finally got spiked by a cute Mexicali girl named Elvira.

Elvira was apparently the one and only employee, since she also handled my paperwork and rang me up. I have no insurance, so I had to pay in advance. She did the deed in another tiny room, which felt even tinier because the majority of the space was taken up by a huge, full-sized trash barrel labeled: MAY CONTAIN SHARPS. May? What, like you're not sure? I certainly wasn't gonna check.

The actual drawing of blood was kind of a letdown after all that build up. What can I say? That Elvira's pretty good with a needle.

Having survived my strange adventure with nothing to show for it but a cotton ball taped to the crook of my arm, I decided to hit that donut shop. I'm happy to report that it was much easier to find.