As a chatty phlebotomist stationed in the ER of a busy hospital, I love talking to the diverse stream of people that come and sit in my chair. It’s freakin amazing what you can learn from people if you ask just the right questions to crack them open.

The angry and cranky people were like my “special challenges”… It was almost like a game I played with myself, to see if I could “discover” the good in them, find out what made them the interesting humans I knew they were, under their prickly exterior. I typically had pretty good success with this, and it made my days feel fulfilling and purposeful- and I always hoped that it made my patients day just a little bit brighter too.

And then I met *Betty. My ultimate “special challenge”

I was calling patients back from the waiting room to get their blood drawn, and I had walked back and forth past her sourpuss face and cloud of angry energy a few times before her name came up on my list.

The triage nurse walking past me, hearing me call her name, whispered under her breath, “good luck with that one, she’s a real piece of work”.

Betty stood up and scowled at me as I greeted her with my intro and walked her and her rbf around back to my chair.

“Well I have real crappy veins, and no one ever gets them. You don’t look like you’ve been doing this very long, so good luck. Just so you know. You better not poke me 100 times.”

“ok well I promise I won’t poke you till I find a good one, let’s just have a look, though, shall we?”

“Yeah. Sure. Thats what you all say”

As we approach the blood-drawing station, the gorgeous, pure, joyful sound of the two year old in the room next to us laughing hysterically rings through the air, making me smile.

“God I love that sound, isn’t it beautiful?” I say to her.

“No. *grimacing* don’t like it at all. Reminds me of my grandson who I don’t get to see”.

‘Here it is’ I think - ‘a piece of humanity peeking out. This poor woman is being deprived of sharing her grandmotherly love. I might be sourpuss too’

“I’m so so sorry you don’t get to see your grandson, that must be so hard for you. Does he live very far away?”

“No, it’s because my ungrateful bitch of a daughter won’t let me see him. He’s ungrateful just like his mother though, too.”

‘Yikes’ I’m thinkin- If my mom talked about me like that to perfect strangers, I might not want her to have a lot of contact w/ my kid, either, right?

But I was on a mission. She was clearly one of my “special challenges”. Try again. Redirect.

“I like your earrings. I have a pair similar to yours except that that top part is wood and there’s a little turquoise part on the side there”

“Well I wouldn’t call them similar then, would you? Those sound completely different. And I don’t really like these ones, they hang too heavy on my ears”

Strikeout AGAIN.

Typically at this point I would have just taken the hint and finished the blood draw in silence, but for some reason her next-level nastiness just made me even more determined to unearth her deeply hidden humanity.

As I’m looking at her arm trying to find a vein, I notice huge scars that looked like she had had surgery in the last year or so. They were all healed up, but didn’t look very old. “Oh my goodness, looks like you had a serious surgery on this arm here, huh? How’s it feeling now? What happened to ur elbow that you needed surgery?”

“Car wreck, 7 months ago. This idiot without insurance t-boned the car going 60. Now I can’t even drive”

“Omg that sounds like a really bad one! That sounds so scary! I’m glad you’re still here with us! That could have been really really bad!”

“Yeah well I wish that I wasn’t. Did you find a vein yet?”

Strikeout #4.

“Nope still lookin” (she really did have gnarly, tiny veins… which was good for me since it gave me more time to talk to her)

As I started feeling the veins on her left hand, I noticed the beautiful and obviously well-worn wedding ring on her finger. This would be my very last swing… If I missed again, I’d throw in the towel and take the L.

“I love the style of your wedding ring!” (I really did) How long have you been married?”

“Almost thirty-five years. But now he left me. He died in the car accident”

Tears immediately sprang to my eyes, as I looked up to look in hers. Hers were welling with tears too. I put my hand on hers, and looked deep into her eyes. She wanted to talk about it.

“Im so so sorry, Betty. What was his name?”

“*Fred.”

“How did you two meet?”

And she told me the story of how growing up in Idaho, he was a good friend of her brothers that she always thought was obnoxious and annoying. But when she ran into him at church while she was home from college he had become very handsome and suddenly less obnoxious. She lit up a little bit as she talked about him.

I stopped looking for a vein for a few minutes, and we just talked about Fred, and their 2 children, and their home they built near the hospital we were in now.

I told her how incredibly sorry I was, and that I know there were no words to help her feel better, and I just encouraged her to just allow herself to feel however she felt - because there’s no right way to deal with a loss so enormous.

She said she just wished she had gone in the car accident too.

That made me tear up again. I felt the fuck out of that - on a level way deep down, cuz I knew she really truly meant it.

I told her I was glad she didn’t because then I never would have gotten to hear about Fred or have had the pleasure of meeting her.

I was by then done drawing her blood (only one poke& without incident thank god), and ready to walk her back to the waiting room. I asked if I could give her a hug, and she said yes. I whispered how sorry I was as we hugged, and squeezed her hand as I gave her one last look in the eyes.

I still think of Betty frequently, almost every day.

I think of her everytime someone does something thoughtless and inconsiderate, I think of her everytime I interact with someone prickly and cranky, everytime I feel tempted to write someone off as an asshole, or react to someones venom with more venom.

I think we’ve all, at one time or another, subconsciously put on our porcupine suit to prevent anymore hurt from getting through to damage our soft, tender hearts, when we are suffering and in emotional pain. It’s a normal human reaction. And some of us are lucky enough to have a strong support system, and were born with/raised with the emotional coping skills to slowly remove our quills, one by one. But not all of us are. Some of us walk around for years and decades in a cloud of lonely anger, hurting others before they have the chance to hurt us. It’s an evolutionary coping strategy, not easily undone.

Most of the time, we won’t have the chance to interact with these people the way I did with Betty. Most of the time (including me), we just write these people off as “a real piece of work” or “assholes”.

And I’m not saying we should stand by while we’re being abused, I’m a big believer in setting boundaries on how you allow people to treat you. And I’m not saying someone gets a pass to mistreat you just because they’re going through some shit.

BUT I can say, for myself, that remembering Bettty helps inform my responses to these types of people, and helps me react with wisdom and understanding to them.

And instead of giving them cause to throw another quill in their suit, I can be one tiny piece of subconscious evidence for why they might want to consider removing one. All those teeny tiny things add up to someones whole life experience.

I want to say thank you to Betty, wherever she is, for this gigantic, ongoing life lesson. I’m thinking of you. I hope the universe has conspired to help you slowly remove your porcupine suit, and that you have been able to let some love into your very broken heart.