DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“I’ll be right back,” said the technician at the blood lab. “I’m going to get some help.” I didn’t hear that last part. It’s just as well; I’d know soon enough that she was an incompetent hack.

We needed to draw blood from my 8-day-old son, to make sure his yellow tint wasn’t jaundice, but rather due to his parents’ predilection for curry. I expected no complications from the procedure, for he’d had a blood sample taken the week before in the hospital and barely whimpered.

Our technician returned. She was a portly woman with lots of makeup, where by “lots” I mean “more than I think looks natural” as opposed to “enough to cover the moustache.” She’d retrieved a senior technician, although the lab-coated senior tech simply stood in the background to supervise. I think our technician, who I dubbed Vampira, was an intern.

What is it with the healthcare industry that interns learn the trade on live patients? Don’t they make cadavers for this sort of thing?

She poked Raphael in the heel with one of those spring-loaded disposable pinprick devices. He didn’t even flinch. “That was smooth,” I thought, until after ten seconds of increasingly confused foot-squeezing, Vampira stammered that no blood was coming out. She’d been holding the pinprick device backwards. In a fairer world, she’d have stabbed herself in the hand with it.

On her second attempt, with guidance from the senior tech (“You’re holding it backwards!”) Vampira drew blood and a scream. Then she began wringing my son’s foot like a rag. This went on for five minutes! In spite of ample evidence to the contrary, I assumed she knew what she was doing, and I let her continue. Finally, though, the tiny wound had healed, and Vampira had failed to collect the three drops of blood she needed, although she had somehow managed to smear blood all over her gloves and my son’s foot. Her aim is as bad as her lancing technique.

“In the hospital,” I offered, “they had little chemical heat packs for this. The heat brings the blood to the surface of the foot, making it easier to collect a sample.” Unlike Vampira, I’d seen this done once before.

“We don’t have those,” said Vampira, flustered, aware that my baby’s agitated state was entirely of her making. But a moment later she noticed a stack of little packets bearing the label “Infant Foot Warmer” on a nearby shelf.

Vampira then failed to activate the warming pack and lamely offered it to the senior tech, who, after a moment’s wrestling, also failed, and took it down the hall in search of competent assistance. To be clear, neither of the technicians on duty was capable of using a device designed to make their jobs easier.

At this point, my son was inconsolable. He’d been stabbed in the heel, had his foot bruised by five minutes of incessant squeezing, and now had to endure the whole procedure a second time because the half-sample they’d collected was beginning to scab over.

The senior tech returned with the warming pack, freshly activated by someone down the hall in possession of a clue. They warmed Raphael’s heel, stabbed him again, and Vampira started up her wringing.

“You would probably collect more if you’d hold his foot below his heart,” I offered. Vampira hadn’t mastered the idea of gravity yet, although from the wheezing and panting after she’d bent down to retrieve a dropped band-aid I would have thought she could extrapolate some of its other properties.

With that correction, the procedure was completed relatively quickly. Vampira was rightfully ashamed and if I had to guess seeking a transfer to a part of the hospital where she’d be less likely to inflict damage on anyone (e.g. the morgue). Raphael recovered as only babies can. But I felt like the world’s worst father as I washed the dried blood off his foot.

For what it’s worth, here’s the right way to collect a blood sample from an infant.

Diary, while inventive and dark and satirical and Vonnegut-esque, is thus far my least favorite Palahniuk book.

I respect the author’s willingness to embrace the supernatural. The idea that a girl from a trailer park can paint domestic scenes of wealthy neighborhoods she’s never seen, but which turn out to exist, with such a level of detail that the subjects recognize themselves on the canvas, is as cool a concept as the nursery rhyme that kills entire families (see Lullabye). Yet the explanation, when it comes, is neither believable nor, more critically, interesting.

The characters are quirky, distinct, original, and wholly unsympathetic. Terrible things happen to most of them, and in every case my reaction was, “Okay, then.”

Palahniuk’s distinctive writing style is fully exercised, but not entirely successful. We’re to believe that the book is the diary of one of the characters, but the narrative voice changes awkwardly, and the text is too insightful and omniscient to possibly be the actual experience of the main character.

I save almost every book I read, but this one is going up on half.com.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)
• Amazon (paperback)

We visited the Charles Schultz Museum, on the theory that little kids enjoy comics. I think maybe our kid is too little, though; he slept through the whole thing. And he can’t see very well yet anyway.

I wandered through the space, reading the placards and the old strips. I’m not really a fan of Peanuts, so I felt disconnected from it all. The exhibit that most appealed to me demonstrates this, as it results from an exchange between the comic and the real world: Snoopy’s Doghouse gets “Wrapped” By Christo

The original Peanuts strips were drawn on sheets of paper measuring about 30'' wide. At that size, the drawings seem much more like art. Most of the detail is lost when the size is reduced to 15% and printed with an 85-line screen onto fuzzy newspaper stock. There’s something beautiful in the bold black lines on thick matte paper that’s entirely absent from the reproductions on newsprint with muffler-shop ads bleeding through from behind.

The biggest eye-opener in the entire museum was this innocuous book on a low table amid photo albums and scrapbooks. “For Adults,” the label declared. What could this be — long-suppressed Peanuts porn, revealed only after the artist’s death?

But it was just a guestbook. I guess the label is an attempt to keep youngsters from doodling on the pages.

On the morning of the delivery, the nurse hands a sheaf of forms to the mother-to-be. Buried within is a release form offering a free portrait of the new baby. Mom is wired to three different machines, having her pulse and blood pressure measured automatically while two others sensors detect uterine contractions and the baby’s heart rate and another chattering electromechanical behemoth plots a seismograph of both. She’s frightened and excited and anxious and slightly nauseous and terrified — oh, wait, sorry, that’s Dad. But she’s not paying close attention to the paperwork; who wants to read ten pages of contracts an hour before having a baby?

A day later, the baby’s out, Mom’s recovering, and Dad is slightly less insane although even more paranoid, if that’s possible. A nurse enters the room to confirm scheduling for the baby photo. Dad expresses confusion, having misunderstood that a member of the hospital staff would shoot a Polaroid for the gallery on the nursery wall. In fact, the photo enterprise is run by a third party, Growing Family. They’ll shoot a picture of your munchkin, in exchange for his or her name and birthdate and your full name and address.

Does this smell like last month’s tuna salad? How many marketers do you think would be interested in knowing you just had a baby? Hint: all of them.

Growing Family’s privacy policy has a long and impressively complicated name: “Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act”. But it gives them the right to share your private information with anyone they choose. This must be some new use of the word “protection” I wasn’t previously familiar with:

Growing Family will use your information from time to time to promote additional products, services, rewards and special offers from Growing Family Network and its select Network Partners.

My point is not that Growing Family was deceitful. My point is that, to my dismay, caveat emptor begins at birth.