I’m always delighted when the phleb/nurse takes a few seconds to make sure that there’s actually a vein before she starts sticking. The way I figure it, the more time she spends prodding my arm with her finger = less time she spends poking me with that damn needle.
To complicate things, yesterday’s episode was with a home health care nurse, so I didn’t really have the option of asking for someone else to draw my blood. I did tell the doctor that I’d rather take a taxi (some days I’m just not up to driving a car) to the clinic to get my blood drawn rather than have this particular nurse draw my blood again. I’ll grant that I was probably particularly hard to stick right then, as I was recovering from a day of diarrhea, but I still think that if she had spent a bit more time FINDING a vein in the first place, quite possibly it would not have been necessary to dig around in my arm with the needle.
When I get my blood drawn I know the routine. The routine was created for me as I am severly afraid of needles. I am talking about the kind of afraid where they sedate you for blood work. I have veins in my Arm that no one can find, So I tell nurses all the time that they need to take it from the back of my hand. Will they listen? Of course not. What it takes to draw my blood without me passing out, or causing anyone else any damage, is not a huge list.
Do not show me the needle, even if you think it will help me be more comfortable with the situation, Show me the needle, you might as well get out the happy pills.
Do not draw from my arm. You will never find a vein there. I have had my blood drawn once a week for the past 5 years almost( and if I missed a week in a month, it was atleast every other week) I think I know by now where the best place for you to draw blood from is.
If you try to draw blood from my arm, you will result in empty needle hanging out of my arm, which I will more than likely notice, and then get faint.
This wonderful nurse in Maine devised a good way to get blood from me pain free, It works, its the only method I have seen work, So If I tell you(the nurse) about it, maybe you should listen.
PLease run my hand under hot water so the veins will pop up and please use a baby butterfly needle to get the blood from the veins in the top of my hand. This keeps me from passing out, and it keeps you from having to stick me a billion times, or until I pass out on your floor.
It’s a fine needle with plastic tabs on the side. Looks like butterfly wings, used for taping down the needle to the back of the hand. They are actualy a lot less threatening than a regular blood draw needle.
(I work in Hospital supply. I know needles.)
I have to have this done tomorrow, for my work’s health plan. I always end up going home early after these things. It’s not pretty. Lynn, I feel for you (and if you email me an address, I will send you chocolate - for real!) - I know my arms are going to look like I’ve been hit by a mack truck too.
My GF always comes home from the doc with her arms looking like she’d spent the day trying to put headlocks on rabid ferrets.
My question to the health care folks here…why not from the top of the foot? Everyone I’ve ever met has huge, floaty, squishy, beautiful veins on their feet. It seems and obvious solution, is there something I’m missing?
When I broke my arm last year, they needed blood from the other arm—why, I know not—before surgery. The nurse poked and poked and poked and finally gave up. “Oh, I can’t find a vein—let me go get the head nurse. She’s real good at this.”
Head nurse comes in and pokes and pokes and pokes, and the first nurse says, “It’s like shooting arrows blindfolded!” Head nurse says, “You really shouldn’t say things like that in front of the patient.”
I think they finally just wound up chopping my arm off with an ax and putting a bucket under it.
My wife just came out of major surgery, 10 hours in the OR and then a week in recovery and a room before she could come home. Part of the procedure, while she was out, included bending her wrists back and inserting needles into her arteries. They’re apparently much tougher to penetrate than veins, having a thicker and denser wall around them. Poor girl now has tremendous bruises in a long, thin “V” shape from her wrists to her elbows. Her nurses said she’d not have wanted to be awake when they were putting those in.
Lynn I am sorry you couldn’t get away from the vampires. Generally the ‘you get one take at it’ means that the tech who’s not so confident will call out the one who’s good.
Jersey - I found your story appalling to the max that a patient would be intentionally given to someone with the expressed desire to have them get poked as poorly as possible.
I wish I could empathize more, but alas my arms could be roadmaps for training phlebotomists. Seriously, you can clearly see every vein running up and down the insides of my arms…put a turniquet on and it becomes 3-D!
My wife, an ultrasound tech, is no stranger to phlebotomy…and in the last hospital Radiology dept she was in, she was the best. Oh yes, better than the trained phlebotomists, and called in routinely for tough draws…her secret? She learned to draw blood before college…when she worked at a vet clinic. All those nurses who think they can look for the vein? Nuh-uh…in vet clinics you have to feel for it. Find it with one hand, hold it there, insert needle.
To my knowledge, she still has a 100% 1st-draw success rate on people. So, my advice is, grab a lowly vet tech and drag them to the doctor’s with you.
Ugh. I hate it when I get a phlebotomist who figures that since s/he usually has little to no trouble drawing bloods for other patients, the same will be true for me. No matter what I might say to the contrary. And yeah, I have crappy veins - butterfly needles only.
I’m thinking that they could get kicked badly by an uncooperative patient if they tried the tops of the feet. Owie.
I, unfortunately for you guys, had great veins as a kid and have moderately good ones now. But I vastly prefer butterfly needles; why, oh WHY aren’t those things the standard? They’re so much easier on a bunch of us, it seems.
