Ouchie!

Today was "fun with injections" day! We learned all about giving every sort of injection under the sun. Intradermal (like the TB test where they inject a small amount of fluid in bubble under your skin (called a bleb FYI)), intramuscular, & subQ (like for insulin or heparin). Scary, scary scary. At first the syringe felt like a foreign object in my hands which suddenly felt large and amazingly clumsy. But within no time, we got the hang of it and were drawing fluids out of vials like experts. Okay, maybe not experts, but not bad for our first day. And surprisingly, no one in my section managed to stick themselves with the needle. At the beginning of lab, our instructor told us that if anyone did stick themselves that they would receive "a stern look from the teacher" and then the shame of having to wear a Mickey Mouse bandaid for the rest of class (which she displayed proudly to show she wasn't joking.) She rocks. So, yes, I escaped unscathed, however I did manage to spill a large quantity of reconstituted 'demi-dose' down my lab coat. But I didn't feel so bad, cuz several other students did them same, and the teacher said that the vials had most likely lost their suction.

I am still kinda afraid of having to reconstitute fluids. You do that when the actual medicine is too unstable in liquid to be pre-mixed. So then based on the concentration conversions listed on the vial and the dosage prescribed by the MD, you need to add solvent (usually sterile water or saline) to the med, and then figure out how many mL you need to administer the correct dose. Again with the scary. And just think....I will have to do this to a real live patient on Tuesday when our clinicals start. Hold me!

We did not have to inject ourselves (or our lab partners) with the syringes. Instead we had "Mr. InjectiPad" (Mr. IP for short) which was a small tan rectangular cushion filled with some unknown substance meant to imitate skin and the underlying dermis and subQ fat. Poor Mr. InjectiPad had a rough day.