I’ve got two extra orifices now. For the time being. They took my blood from me. I finally went in. After fasting 12 hours and telling my mom on the way out that they’d have a hard time finding a vein because folks had historically had difficulties in that area with me. I waited an hour and a half to see the phlebotomist. She saw my Coney Island hat and asked if I was from New York. I said most recently, was she? She said Buffalo. I said that didn’t count. She said shhh, the people here don’t know that. Her grandmother was from Brooklyn off Fulton. I said that I used to live off Fulton. We said all this while she looked for a vein. She had a hard time finding one. I told her that I was no professional but when I shot heroin, I found it much easier to stick my hand. She asked if I would like her to stick my hand. I told her to do whatever she was comfortable doing. She stuck my hand. The blood was slow in coming. She asked me if I’d drunk any water this morning. I said I had drunk a lot of water but that I had felt quite dehydrated in the night and continued to feel that way. (This was despite my pissing white piss twice during the wait; that always happens to me; I think I have a fluid uptake problem.) She said that if she had to guess she’d guess that I hadn’t had anything to drink this morning. She had me squeeze my hand. Then she squeezed my hand. I said I didn’t know we’d be holding hands. I told her it made my day. She told me not to get too excited. Then she asked if I could see that tiny diamond under her glove. I told her I wouldn’t tell him that she said ‘tiny.’ She looked at my hand and said the vein was blown. She pulled the needle out and pointed to a bubble under the skin, then threw away the needle. She said that she had a guy once that told her he used to go into his forehead; he had a vein that ran right across it. She said she bet she could find one in my neck but she found one in my right arm instead. The blood came quickly. She took three tubes’ worth. It only took a few minutes.