Well, first, I got my blood draw and a successful IV stick—on the second try. The faculty member felt bad for me because I was terribly crestfallen that I didn’t get the first stick and let me stick him since I had a spare catheter. Now THAT is dedication! I’m so glad because I would have been a bit sad. The bad news is that my lab partner evidently nicked my nerve while digging around for my vein, so I’m in for at least a month of numbness and pain, and of course it’s my dominant arm. It was numb at first but has subsided to a constant dull ache, but the worst part is that I have lost about half power in my thumb. I NEED my thumb. I have already learned to space-bar with my left thumb, but writing with an actual pen is a painful affair. This is bad. I’m glad I was the injured party and not the one who perpetuated the injury, because that would be worse. I once hurt a classmate with an otoscope and felt awful for weeks! And now every time I have to stick someone I will be riddled with fear that I’ll be causing them disability and pain. Bah. I keep kicking myself because while she was digging, it didn’t FEEL right, and I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to throw off her concentration. I should have said, "Yo. Stop. Something is wrong." Shoulda, coulda, hadda, oughta. Nothing for it now.
I have a learning disability with rhythm strips, too. I have carefully read about the rationale of EKG lead placement and of each kind of dysrhythmia, yet I am failing at discerning any but the most obvious ones. Our lecture on this is tomorrow after the do-or-die math test, so I’m just hopeful that they dumb it down enough that I can have an ah-ha moment.
I am on the schedule at work for day shift starting mid-February: a-OO-ga! Color me delighted! I was draggin’ ass wicked bad last night. I had a C diff patient who pooed every hour on the hour and was on total bedrest. We know what that means. When I got home, I stood under a boiling hot shower for about a half hour and still fancied that I smelled eau de C diff radiating off of me. One of the nurses had a screaming fit at another nurse, including cursing and LITERAL yelling (charge nurse: "don’t yell in the hall"), and it really bothered me. This is how not to approach conflict resolution!
Ouch!
Take care of that wing, you’ll be needing it pretty often.
Check out the supplement to Nursing2005, May. Volume 35, Supplement 1, Updated August 2007. It talks about avoiding just that type of injury. (I should have sent this link BEFORE it happened, sorry)
Drop me a line if you can’t get to the copy yourself.
Markie
Yikes! What part of your arm was she digging? An IV should only be inserted into a superficial vein that you can either see very well or feel very well. So sorry to hear about that! Good luck and hope you heal well.
This is really interesting about the nerve damage. I never knew that things could go wrong like that. In fact, there are probably a whole hell of a lot of “things that could go wrong” that those of us not in the profession simply don’t want to know about.
Yeah: you don’t. Seriously.