CONTENT WARNING: Description of needles / blood

As a student midwife, one of the things that I had to learn was drawing blood for testing.

One morning, I was given this task as there were a lot of blood tests due and it would be good practice. Together with my mentor, I put together all the bundles of equipment I would need into trays along with the paperwork for the test, so I could pick up the next set while sending the ones I had just taken to the lab. My mentor joined me for the first couple to make sure of my technique, and then I was set loose on my own.

After four women, I had gotten into a routine: enter the bedside, introduce myself and explain why I was there, check that I had the right patient, place the tourniquet, find the vein, clean the skin, needle in, attach the blood bottle, take the blood, detach the blood bottle, release the tourniquet, needle out and onto the tray, plaster on, and throw the contents of tray into the sharps bin. Then, I would sit and write the name of the patient on the blood bottle and package it up to send to the lab.

I got to one patient’s room who needed multiple bottles of blood, so I put them all down on the tray as I filled them. Then, when I had finished, I picked up the tray and threw every single blood bottle into the sharps bin.

I have never felt my stomach drop so quickly, and the look of horror on my face as I turned around to my patient (who it turned out was a nurse) made her burst out laughing.

As I was taking her blood again, she told me the story of the first time she had done that and reassured me that I was now part of a very large club.

In the mid-1990s, when I was still a graphic design student, my classmate and I answered a call from a publishing company that wanted to publish a beautiful and creative illustrated cookbook with recipes from celebrities. My classmate got hired as an illustrator, and I got a job as a designer and art director.

The company had an in-house designer who became my contact. He was really, really old. (He was probably the age I am now or younger.) I remember that he had a computer with 2 GB of hard disk space. I had never heard of GB; it was absolutely mind-blowing!

Now, I was a young woman going to a higher education design school, and at the time, I had absolutely no practical industry experience (apart from a band flyer or two).

[Designer] was “old school print trade”, was originally a typographer, and was educated from within the industry.

I have since thought of all the ways this working relationship could have gone wrong.

But [Designer] became a wonderful mentor. He was always respectful of me and what I was. He would sometimes roll his eyes and say, “How come you don’t know this?” but it was always in a way that meant, “How come they don’t teach this?”, not in a way that was putting me down.

After the book project — where he gave me completely free rein to create a layout I am still proud of to this day — he hired me for other projects, as well. I designed the logo and packaging for a kids’ DVD set! And I did a range of advertisements for their books. Everything was a first for me, and everything felt exciting and gave me tons of valuable experience.

It was only later that I understood just how confidence-building this was. The nineties were a very different time, and as a young, female designer, I have since certainly experienced my share of grumpy and/or condescending older men. Not letting them get to me was easier because of my self-confidence.

I could have gotten a lot more work from [Designer], but in my final year, I decided to stop working for the company. I think now that it was the wrong decision, but I was also in a band and working in a restaurant. By the time I was out of school and starting to understand how important that client relationship was, [Designer] was no longer working there. 

I don’t even remember his name! But I think of him with gratitude for all the trust and faith he had in me, and I always try to “pay it forward” when I work with young or inexperienced people of our trade.

This started the year before my high school graduation (around the 2000s) and continued into my graduation year. In my English class, the teacher had a student teacher from Finland who did the best she could. She was not marvelous, just a normal, nervous student teacher.

Halfway through the year, we got the message that our teacher had had an accident and can’t come in for a while. She had sliced off the tip of one finger of her left hand with a cheese knife. We were horrified but quickly reassured: no, not the top, the tip. It was just a tiny slice and would heal soon enough. However, the incident had been so traumatic, she had to take a break from work and [Student Teacher] would take over. She couldn’t take over all the classes, so our classes were halved.

After about a month, we started wondering when [Teacher] would come back. Hadn’t her injury healed? When we asked about it, we were told she couldn’t handle the chalk and dust from our blackboard. And she couldn’t write with that hand.

Wait… wasn’t she right-handed? And she always just used an overhead projector with sheets; she never wrote on the blackboard. But, [Student Teacher] did, so maybe that was it?

After three more months, [Student Teacher] let us know she would stay for another two months instead of going home to Finland. However, she couldn’t take over all the missing classes. There was one other qualified English teacher… who had been home with burnout for two months already.

So, better than nothing, I guess? I have no idea what the school board was thinking. And our own teacher was still home sick after that incident with the cheese knife? If you don’t explain what’s going on, teens start making up their own stories, which luckily all ended with “she just wants extra vacation”.

Two months before the end of the school year, [Student Teacher] had to go home… and there was no replacement teacher. At all. And the school seemed okay with it.

They also seemed okay with the fact that we had no English Teacher at the start of the next year. [Teacher] hadn’t recovered and [Student Teacher] was way back in Finland. [Burnout Teacher] was still home sick.

It took until halfway through our graduation year before [Burnout Teacher] recovered enough to take up some lessons. And his lessons were: “Here’s some text. Read it and fill in the multiple-choice questions.”

So, for almost a year, we had little to no English classes, which were supposed to prepare us for our national exams.

I do not know which deity was bribed by whomever, but we all passed for some reason.

We sell yarn for knitting at my workplace. Sometimes people will make something with that yarn. Then, they’ll wear the garment they made and realize the color and texture are not to their liking.

Then, they’ll undo the pullover or whatever they made and try to return these used lumps of yarn with the excuse that we offer an extended return time — for UNUSED yarn.

I was walking through this very long train to position myself for the optimal point to disembark, so I went through multiple interconnecting doors between carriages.

This was decades ago before interconnecting doors slid apart just by pressing a button, and on this train, it was a hinged door you had to push. Usually, these hinged doors would open easily, but sometimes they’d stick a bit.

With one door, I turned the handle and pushed, but there was some friction so I had to push a bit harder to open it. 

When I turned round to close it, I noticed a carrier bag full of shopping there, and I realised that this was what caused the friction. And someone sitting in the seat next to the door was glaring at me. 

Obviously, one of the stupidest places to leave a bag is in front of a door, so I just stared back at him for two seconds, silently closed the door, and sat down. I looked up a few seconds later, and the man was still glaring at me. I stared back for another couple of seconds and resumed reading my paper but not before noticing that he’d reinstated the bag in front of the door.

Thirty seconds later, a woman came through the door and apologised to the man for having pushed his shopping aside, but the man just silently glared back at her, and again, he put the bag in front of the door. He was also still glaring at me.

I stopped taking any notice until about ten minutes later. I looked up and saw the man picking the bag up while someone was turning the handle, and after that person came through, he put his bag in front of the door again.

This was a busy commuter train in South London, so the man must have been doing this continually throughout the journey — hearing the door handle, picking up his bag, and then putting it back again — instead of putting it in the overhead rack or between his legs like any normal person.