Blood, coats and plastic booties

Megan has just had her blood drawn in a St Petersburg clinic.

Now, have you ever heard of a medical clinic with a coat check? Well, I
hadn’t, but it didn’t really surprise me. I suppose the reason for the
Russian obsession with the coat check is pretty much the same as for
the slippers — you don’t want to drag your dirty coat into a museum or
a theater, and certainly not a medical clinic. So I went downstairs,
checked my coat, paid three rubles for plastic booties to cover my
shoes, and went back upstairs. The woman took my Personal Medical Book,
took an ummm, sample, and gave me a little piece of paper which I was
supposed to take to another office downstairs to get my blood drawn.

In
my American blood-drawing experiences, they always take the vial, seal
it up, put a label on it, and put it in a designated place to be taken
to the lab. Well, the blood-drawing room looked like an ordinary
office, except there was a rack of bloody test tubes sitting on the
desk. She used a clean needle to prick my finger, thank god, but the
little pipettes she used to suck up my blood, though labeled "sterile",
were loosely wrapped in brown paper. She put my blood in a test tube
next to the others and wrote my information down in a notebook that
looked like it was manufactured in 1973. So, you know, be sure to wear
those plastic booties for hygiene, Megan.