A long time ago, I did some collections training at a hospital that pretty much had 3 populations: complicated pregnancies + very sick babies, drug abusers, and a small group of “everyone else”.

Drug users often have a huge stinking vein in their arm but we pretty much never get to use it because it is their drug vein and they don’t like people touching it. 9 times out of 10, their other veins are incredibly wispy or incredibly scarred, both of which are terrible things to collect from and we normally try to avoid if possible.

This one time, there was a known drug user that my trainer and I couldn’t successfully collect from, and it was going to become a Doctor to Draw order, ie, no one is allowed to touch him for 24 hours unless it is a doctor because they are allowed to draw from some pretty strange places if they really want the blood. So the patient said to us, “listen, I promise I won’t stab you, but if you give me the needle, I can do the collection for you.”

We ended up letting him and he got the tubes from one tiny little vein on the back of his arm. Which is not a usual poke site at all.

It was interesting.