Gauges and Inches

Tuesday night was fresh with learning how to actually give injections. With 10 captive audience members our instructors gave us a quick once over on how to give shots. I remember maybe a third of what I was told, it was so much to take in. Lets face it though, it's not rocket science to give injections so I should be fine right?

I am going in today for open lab in a bit to practice the joys of inserting urinary catheters and giving injections. For our meds check off next week we have to give another unwilling student an IM injection. For those of you who do not know what those are, they are usually deep injections given in the hip, upper arm near the shoulder or given in the upper thigh region. They hurt the most depending on what is being injected in you. For example vaccines are usually quite painful, I can tell you from recent experience with my Hep B vaccine....my arm still hurts and it's been 6 days.

I am not scared of needles per se but I am scared to death of having blood drawn from the crease in my elbow. I hate that. I will vegal and faint on you, so please draw blood from the back of my hand so I can stick my arm way behind my back and not look at what you're doing. I am hopeful I will not have too many patients that will vomit and faint on me like I would to them in their shoes when getting pricked by needles.

Memorizing the names of the injection spots by muscles is not as daunting as memorizing needle gauge sizes with the length of needles per injection type. A bit overwhelming but manageable right? Every nurse to be has had to do this.

I am hoping in open lab today we are full of copious amounts of humor and excitement as we were on Tuesday night. We had saline flying from the ends of shiny needles and syringes into the air and laughing about it. We weren't making a mess on purpose, rather we were trying to get the right amount of pressure on our syringes to push the air bubbles out and this caused a ruckus. Open lab is always laid back and fun, we don't have too much pressure and can take things at our own pace.

There are a few images of us eager lioness cubs learning. The group shot is of us being duckfaces and goofy. Taken during our clinicals this past weekend. Only 6 out of the 10 of us were able to academically make it this time.