My Yellow T-Shirt

On Friday I wore my new yellow T-shirt. At breakfast everyone who saw it burst out laughing.  Across the front is a picture of big brown Hershey bar and the words, “I could give up chocolate, but I’m not a quitter.” 

At the dialysis center that afternoon I stood in front of Patsy, the big black woman who sits in the chair next to me.  She, too, laughed out loud when she read the inscription on my shirt. 

I sat in my own chair, and Janell came to stick me with the needles.  I said, “Look at my new T-shirt.”  When the expression on his face did not change, I said, “Read what it says.”  

He read the words aloud but did not even smile.   Janell is from the Philippines.

One of the Indian nurses came to check the machine which cleans my blood.  She read the words on my shirt.  She also seems puzzled by the meaning. 

Except for two black women, all the technicians and nurses at the dialysis center are foreign born.  Most are from India, although a group is from the Philippines and one young woman (a favorite of mine) is from Ethiopia.  The head technician is from Eutreia, a small country on the east coast of Africa that he and I seem to be the only ones who can locate it on a map and only he can spell correctly. 

I won’t speculate here on why there are not more native-born Americans in these jobs, when so many people are looking for work.  The technicians at my facility skillful in programing the machine which cleans my blood and in sticking the needles into my arm to draw blood from the artery and push it, cleaned of poisons, back into the vein.  They work incredibly long hours, starting at 5:30 in the morning and sometimes staying until 11:00 p.m.  I do not now the pay scale, but one young man is going to school to become a licensed vocational nurse, saying he can earn more that way. 

All the technicians and nurses at the center worked on my left arm at some time.  I thought I knew each of them, when they came to the U.S,, the ages of their U.S.-born children.  All came to America seeking a better life for themselves and their children.  Raphael, the man from Eutreia, has paid for all four of his children to graduate from U.S. colleges.  Angie, who earns little as a dialysis technician, has a son who is a doctor in residence at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

All of them talk fluent English of a sort, but for some it is limited.  The doctor ordered the use of a longer needle to reach the deep vein in my upper arm.  The technician kept saying she would use a “big” needle.  She used the right length, despite not understanding the difference between “big” and “long.”  

I should not be surprised when none of them got the joke about eating lots of chocolate because “I’m not a quitter.”