Be Braver Than Me
A small-town blood bank confession.
A daily column about freedom, exploration, life in general, and creating work and a life you actually like. There are stories.
I’m not proud of this story, but, well, it happened.
So there I was, donating blood in a small town outside Colorado Springs last summer.
The young woman doing the intake process—vitals, dreaded finger poke, reviewing my answers to questions, the like—and I were having a nice chat during all of it. Her not recently-washed, dark hair was pulled back, with part of it braided. This detail becomes very relevant to the story.
Because blood banks want to know where your blood has been, I got to tell her about all the countries I’ve visited. If you ever want a captive audience for your travelogues, I recommend donating blood and being very thorough in your recollections.
I digress. We were approaching the end of the interview when I saw… it.
A small spider. Nestled in her braided hair.
I shudder as I even type this. You should know that I loathe spiders. My very vivid imagination can turn a spider at any visible distance into an immediate threat, bestowing upon it marvelous powers of time and space travel. This one was a mere two feet away.
It was a light-colored, small, crablike spider which stood out against her dark braid. It wasn’t going anywhere fast, but it was moving enough to let me know it was alive. I shudder again.
While maintaining now-guarded small talk, my mind raced through my possible options. Tell her? If she remotely shares my spider phobia, I was giving her no good option for getting it out—there was no way she could loosen that grungy braid fast.
Whack her in the head and explain later? I strongly considered this approach, and in all seriousness even considered taking off my shoe to whack her braid with. This didn’t seem remotely appropriate.
My third option was to reach in with my bare fingers and pluck the spider out.
I’m not proud of it, but what I chose to do was… exactly nothing.
Even as blood was being pumped from my vein, the irony of the situation was not lost on me: I would sacrifice life-saving blood to a complete stranger, but I would not save someone I now knew from an itsy, bitsy spider.
And for that, I’m sorry.
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Eek! So native New Yorkers are inherently familiar with strangers. Really! I likely would have told her. Though I hate having blood drawn so I might have been too preoccupied to notice.
It’s so easy to sit, relaxed, at home and say what I’d do.
Especially as spiders don’t scare me and I promptly chase form & remove for my wife. No, I do not tell her that I found any in the bathroom.
With the good rapport we had, I hope I would ask the intake clerk to humour me, lean forward, and I’d brush it from her hair.
BTW great that you are a blood donor!