Phlebotomist in the making

Well...I'm not really a phlebotomist (person who takes blood) in the making. Today in Barbados, we had HIV Regional Testing Day at various locations around the island to encourage the population to know their HIV status as it is a disease that has relatively high prevalence in our country.

This is something that happens every year and the organisers at the Ministry of Health usually request the help of the medical students for blood taking. This is what I spent my entire day doing.

I probably took blood from about 50 people or so...maybe a little more. At the location I was stationed, we had about 165 people participate. I very willingly volunteered to be phlebotomist because I really wanted the practice of taking blood...it's something that will be required of me in the years to come and I wanna be able to be agile about it...quick and smooth...in and out...and hopefully with as little pain and as few sticks as possible. I certainly haven't mastered it yet but I'm definitely a whole lot better and somewhat more confident about doing it. Yay!

On another note, I watched the Life In A Day documentary that I was talking about before. To someone without much interest in it, I guess it would be pretty boring because I watched it with my Mom and she fell asleep 20 minutes in. I thought it was a pretty interesting film. It was definitely a really nice thing to see how people spend their days around the world...a very culturally diverse film, for sure. It astounded me that a Korean man was determined to travel around the world by bicycle and has not even been the slightest bit deterred from it because of the 5 accidents and 4 surgeries he's had. All he said was "there are a lot of careless drivers"...he visited 190 countries! He's gotta be fit. Haha. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should give it a watch...it's an hour and 34 minutes, I believe.

And now...my weekend!