03. Trading My Soul for a Blood Draw
I thought functional medicine treated the whole person—instead, I came away feeling small and miserly.
On the day of the functional medicine blood test, I left my writing circle early, packing a lunch bag with crackers, nuts,cheese, and an apple to break the fast on the ride home.
It was the kind of day when the sun warms your forehead through the windshield and turns the tips of your eyelashes into tiny disks of light—the kind that makes you feel like everything will be okay. Instead, I felt unsettled after the intake appointment and resentful that their office was out in the exurbs. Turning into the 1980s office park, I recognized the trio of identical buildings with stingy parking slots. As I inched my minivan around the tight lanes, my heart shrank into a hard nut, feeling murderous toward the lot designer and the drivers who had taken every spot.
The lobby was populated with grim people in the last third of their lives, pushing wheelchairs or standing overwhelmed at the parking payment kiosk.
When I saw the front desk from Jasmine’s background, I felt a chime of familiarity, but no one was wearing headsets or "taking care of" people—it had just been a Zoom backdrop. The office was tiny, clearly the least expensive unit in the building.
Before I’d even given my name, the receptionist asked if I wanted to buy a membership. For $39 or $99 a month, it would pay for itself with credits toward acupuncture and IV drips. I declined, forked over my $20 co-pay, and sat in one of three armchairs jammed by a window overlooking the parking lot. Faux-wood shelves displayed branded supplements for adrenal, liver, and thyroid support. With no magazines around, I flipped through a brochure advertising hydrafacials and dermal fillers.
A nurse led me into a room with an orange helmet on a desk, hooked to a web of wires. "What’s this?" I asked, feeling a jolt of panic that it was a costly extra.
"It’s the WAVi brain scan—it measures cognitive functioning and reaction time using EEG."
"Will my insurance cover it?" I asked in a rare moment of assertiveness.
"We’d have to bill it first, but if they don’t, it won't cost more than $300."
"I’ll check with my insurance," I lied, "and come back later." I was both proud to have weaseled out of it and annoyed I couldn’t just say no.
In the blood draw room, a nurse with compassionate eyes waited. She asked what I was suffering from as she held my arms, looking for a vein. She was working here to pay for nursing school, having struggled for years with mysterious symptoms before discovering it was her thyroid. "I hope you feel better, too," she said, tapping a vein with the butterfly needle. She was the most alive person I’d met here, and I’d probably never see her again.
Back out in the sunlight, I felt like running. I had entered a tug-of-war with them: me trying to get attention, them trying to extract money. Merging onto the freeway, I thought of Linda, the private health coach. She would take care of me, wouldn’t she? But how could I say yes?