On Thursday, after a drought of having done nothing clinical I finally struck gold in being able to bleed patients after a morning tutorial with our beloved local phlebotomist. After the morning supervised tutorial me and Liz were let lose as unsupervised bleeders.
On this note, the afternoon found me being ‘invited’ to practise bleeding one of our dearly loved on the Clisham ward. Bless his soul, the man had really undetectable veins. Didn’t help that the nurse assisting was both nice and sympathetically condescending at the same time. After half an hour, working without a proper tourniquet (I had forgotten mine, and thus had to rely on the nurse as a manual tourniquet...which probably didn’t help the situation on retrospect), and minimal supply of butterflies and uncooperative veins , I finally threw in the towel whilst the nurse left to pilfer more butterflies from the neighbouring stroke unit and decided to do things against protocol. Thankfully, the man was well sedated and hopefully unaware to what we were doing to him.
Yes, so fed up with the touniquetless situation, I did the one thing that I recalled from watching ER, grabbed the largest pair of gloves and tied it around the man’s arm and starting tapping fervently on all his venous pathways as I could recall from my distant anatomy lessons. And lo and behold I find two possible sites for bleeding. And when nursie returns, he goes....’ shouldn’t the gloves be on your hands?’ I was like .....whatever, I had an extra pair anyway....
Seriously...everyone does this! And do you honestly want to continue standing here like this for another half an hour subjecting this poor man to incessant stabbings because we can’t tourniquet him properly!
Anyhoos, managed to draw blood without incident and so left the ward with the prized samples for the lab feeling utterly smug and with a sense of achievement that is probably 2 degrees below how I felt after having passed my fourth year finals.
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