Getting Poked (Warning, this is about needles!)

When you're sick you get poked with needles a lot. Before my first treatment I had a port-a-cath surgically implanted in my body. It's this donut shaped device located over my right breast just under my skin that's attached to a tube that is inserted directly into my artery. It makes chemo infusions way easier and as a result there's less damage to the veins in the arm and less chance that the toxic chemicals will do tissue damage. So, after I got the port I thought I wouldn't have to get my arm poked anymore, but alas, I was wrong. Every time I go in for treatment they have to take blood samples to determine if I'm healthy enough for chemo. Every time I get a scan done I have to have an IV so they can inject me with dyes.

And here's the heart of this rant. Why can't they ever get it right?

Lab technicians are specially trained to draw blood, and most hospitals now employ people who are specially trained to insert IVs and rove around the hospital doing just that. So if these people are specifically trained in the fine art of needle poking, why do they still mess up my veins? Don't get me wrong, there are some who are masters of their craft. One tech at the Cancer Center ("Dann the Mann") has never once missed my vein, but of the two others one has missed it every time and one has missed it a couple of times. Today for my CT scan I had an IV inserted by one of those roving specialists, and this was the third time I'd seen this woman and the third time she's missed my vein.
Missing the vein or poking all the way through a vein hurts, some times it hurts a lot. Once about 10 years ago one of the nerves in my arm was pricked and damaged by a needle during a blood draw. It took about a year, a painful year, for the nerve to heal. Things are worse now because ever since my mastectomy I'm not allowed to have any pressure put on my left arm. No blood pressure cuffs and no turnicates allowed. So my right arm takes the full brunt of constant poking and frequent mishaps.
Today, as I'm nursing my aching arm and watching the bruise appear I wonder how it is that hospitals continue to employ people so completely incompetent at their job.