The Vein Dowser (1998)

Touch my Hands: Bessie the Vein Dowser

When you want to find a vein of water underground in Tallahassee, Florida, you call a dowser. When you want to find a vein in a person you call Bessie Smith, RN.

Dowsers wander around your property with a forked stick until the stick dips. "Here," they point. "Drill it here." And the well driller does. I saw a dowser work, once. This one didn’t use a forked stick: he used a backhoe.. My friend Bob had a broken underground water line. He’d searched for it fruitlessly for a week, digging holes all over the side yard. He called in Willie, the local backhoe operator, and showed him where he thought the break most likely was. Willie didn’t seem to listen to him. He bent over his steering wheel for a few minutes, holding lightly to the hydraulic levers. Then he suddenly dropped it into gear and headed for a place two hundred feet away from where Bob had directed him. Bob ran behind, trying to keep up. He lowered his scoop, quickly dug down four feet and hit a break in the line precisely where the water was squirting out underground. Then, while Bob stood slack-jawed by the edge of the hole, Bubba drove over to a second place seventy-five feet distant, lowered his bucket, and quickly exposed a second leak that Bob didn’t know about.

Bessie Johnson is like that. She finds veins under the surface of people’s skin. I heard about her from a friend who worked as an IV nurse in a Tallahassee hospital. All day my friend went from room to room putting IV lines in people. You do this every day for a few years and you get really good at it. My friend could get a needle into the veins of people with tiny or collapsed veins, or people who had had many previous intravenous lines, with consequent scarring. It might take her a few tries with a really complicated one, but generally she could do it.

There were certain cases, however, that she or any other nurse simply couldn’t get a line into no matter how hard they tried. These were inevitably very sick people for whom getting intravenous fluids and medications into was a matter of life and death. For these people, they would page Bessie Johnson wherever she was at the hospital.

Bessie is a large, Southern African-American woman with an easy manner and a perpetual smile. She has been putting IVs into patients at the Tallahassee General Hospital for thirty years. I got her to talk with me one day about what she did and how she did it. Initially a little guarded about her gift, she eventually warmed to my serious interest.

"Yes, it’s true that I can get an IV line into anybody," she admitted. "I’ve never not been able to do it on somebody -- not after my first year, anyway. When I go in to see a patient, I always give myself just one try. I have to get it in that one try. I always tell myself this. And I always do." "When they call me, it’s always somebody that’s been stuck a bunch of times. It’s usually an old, sick person whose veins are all collapsed or some little, newborn baby in its mama’s lap who is all dehydrated and squalling. The mama’s always real upset, and the baby’s upset, too. Lots of times when I come in, there is a whole group of nurses and doctors around that person’s bed. When I come in, that crowd just parts. I feel like Michael Jordan," she chuckled. "When I slip that needle in so easy and test it, they just about always look up and say, ‘That’s it?’ Lots of times they cry – the old person or the mama. I start the drip and pretty soon they start to pinken up and feel better. It makes me feel good."

"How do you do this?" I asked. "How do you hit the vein every time?" Bessie paused before replying.  "I lay my hand on their skin, and I know what those veins are doing," she said simply. It became clear that Bessie was describing exactly what she did. Putting her hand over the surface where veins lie, she visualized – literally saw -- the veins under the skin. She saw them even if they were in an unusual place, if they tended to roll in a certain direction when pricked by the needle, or if certain places were impenetrable because of scar tissue. She saw them like Willie the dowser saw water underground. It was then simple to insert the needle into the center of the vein that she was seeing.

"How do you suppose you got this ability?" I asked her. "From God," she replied immediately as if, perhaps, I were a little bit dense. "All gifts come fron God."

Given this, I knew what Bessie was going to tell me in response to my last question.

"Do they ever ask you to train others to do what you do?" I asked her. "Oh, Lordy, yes!" she laughed. "They send me them young nurses all the time. But you can’t really teach somebody how to do this. It’s not something you learn by teaching. I just tell them: Lord, child, just touch my hands."