Fun with IVs

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Ok, so far this week I have been playing “survivor” for some mission with our unit and the Pjs (we’re a rescue unit). It’s pretty fun. I get to see how things are like on the ground, I get to see some really pretty scenery, and I get to ride up into the helocopter on the hoist.

Except for today. I mean, I got to do all that stuff but it still sucked. Today, part of the scenario was where I had a broken femur and I was bleeding profusly. So I’m laying there, the Pj comes and asks me what’s wrong. I tell him, he cuts open my leg, sees the wound (I had a maskthingywhatever) and places his knee on my theigh and puts ALL OF HIS WEIGHT. Now, I was called to pretend it hurt when they touched my leg. I didn’t have to pretend. That hurt like bloody hell.

Oh, it gets worse. They then decide that I need an IV. I hate needles. I hate needles with an undying passion. I hate needles more than… um…your mom. Why? Because they’re sharp and pointy. Sharp and pointy and they’re used to poke things, because they’re sharp and pointy and they poke my skin and…uh…yeah. Anywho,

I start freaking out, see the last paragraph if you want to know why I freak out. But I try to be good. I honestly do. They were going to put it in my right arm, so I clentch my left hand, turn my head away, and I am very cogniscent of my breathing. I take great pains to breath slow and deep. In-out. In-out. In with the butterflies, out with the bees. I am holding on to my sanity by a thread. And then, poke. Next thing I know, I’m getting this tingly sensation all throughout my body. I start to tense up all over. Next thing I hear is “Breath, don’t freak out, don’t freak out. Ok, he’s freaking out. Pull the IV out. Scenerio’s over. Call the 60s back in.”

So they pull the IV out and I start feeling a <size=1>little</size> bit better. They sit me up and start asking me questions. Who I am. What day it was. What I was doing etc. I knew it all, but I couldn’t talk. My tounge would just not work. I couldn’t open or close my hands either. It was like they were asleep, but a hundred times worse. It took about two minutes of struggling to get any movement back in there. Finally, once I could stand but up, I got hoisted back onto the helocopter and went home. My arms are barely not hurting anymore.

Today was fun.

2

I just wanna know why you hate my mom!

3

Oh, and if it makes you feel any better, I fainted while having my blood drawn …during my nursing school physical exam- Oh yeah.

4

He cut open your leg?!

5

He cut open my pant leg to see that I had this rubber thingy on it.

6

Try getting an IV when your subconscious “knows” it will make you sick. For a year after I had finished chemo, I could not get an IV or blood drawn without puking. Add to the fact that when you’re nervous your veins shrink, so it usually took multiple tries to find a working vein.

Seems like they might have warned you that a real IV would be a possibility for this fake scenario.

7

what a baby, sheesh

8

Interesting. I had my first and second IVs yesterday. I loved the way she was digging around in there, especially when it didn’t work the first time. The only plus was that the lady doing it didn’t try to tell me not to watch… which I’ve had come up a couple of times I’ve given blood.

BUT, yeah… two liters of saline later and they send me home. I love dehydration.

9

RandMcnally, your “rubbery thing” is a moulage.
Was the Pj applying pressure with his knee? :rolleyes:

I’m surprised the put in a real needle, when I went through medic training, we just taped the tubing to the “patient” and put a sign on him.

10

They did say there was a possibility that they would stick me, but I seriously thought I could hack it.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

And yes, the PJ was applying pressure with his knee while he was checking other vital signs and until he put on the tournaquet (at least with that one it wasn’t put on too tight).

11

Heh, during my medic class, when we partnered up to practice what, for most of us, our first sticks, I made damn sure that I got the “nurse” who was in our class. Now, normally, I have high regard for nurses. I understand quite well that their training and knowledge (almost always) far surpasses mine. But this woman, I found out later, was basically a nurse’s aide. (To be fair, I think she might have been an LPN, but how she passed her exams, I have no idea; she was as dumb as a brick.) It took her, I dunno, five hours (oh, ok, only about three minutes) to poke around with her needle trying to get a vein in my hand. I do want to point out, though, that those three minutes were with her actively moving a sharp pointy stick inside of my flesh. I have shown the vein she was going for to several other people, and their response is always along the lines of “how the hell did she miss THAT!” I am not a small man; I do not have little old lady veins.

After it was over, I calmly tried to eat something and drink water in a vain effort to not pass out. When the instructors noticed I was turning a pale shade of green and even more unable to make a coherent sentence than usual, they decided maybe I should get some of that lovely oxygen sitting right there.

Ouch.

12

For a second, I was wondering why IVs were fun, but not IIIs or Vs.

Glad to hear you made it out okay, despite the pain and inconvenience.

Robin, who has arms like a road map and who has no good horror stories about venipuncture gone wrong.

13

I sympathize with your hatred of IV’s. I have had zero good experiences with them. Blown veins, missed veins, infiltrated IV, all of which sucked in a huge, huge way. You have my total sympathy, esp. if you didn’t really NEED on for any reason. I’d not appreciate that.

14

One of the greatest things about military medical training–especially special ops military medical training–is people aren’t worried about hurting each other. During evaluations, the “patient” will get stuck with 8 or 9 IVs before lunch. Then it’s time for someone else to play the hurt guy. This doesn’t even take into account all the practice up until that point or all the Real Fun With IVs we have up in the barracks and on our own time!!
IVs are the least of peoples’ worries. The DREs and NGI tubes are much fucking worse!!! There’s no simulating for those either!!!

15

Wow! I got off easy then. Of course, I was in medic school in 1965, so much as changed.
We placed NG tubes and started IVs in each other in nursing school. That was bad enough.
We were just exposed to cotton mouth snakes and quick sand in the middle of the night. (Map and compass course final) And probably alligators, it was in a Georgia swamp.
They did try to poison me with colored smoke bombs. My nose ran bright purple and yellow for three days.
Since I weighed less than 100 lbs, I was the litter “patient” on every run our team made through the obstacle course. It seemed that every smoke bomb dropped rolled directly under my litter.
:rolleyes:

16

I’m a phlebotomist and a laboratory assistant. I have trained nurses to draw blood… and I have seen so many of them do the exact thing you describe. I feel for the patients :frowning:

Nurses are great for many things. Drawing blood seems to NOT be one of them. I was somewhat of the resident pro at it, and I felt horrible when seeing patients that had been through the gamut of other nurses and phlebs before me. How they could miss a vein the size of my thumb, I’ll never know.

I’ve never put in an IV, only drawn blood, and they’re slightly different procedures. IVs are more difficult – but on occassion I’ve been able to draw blood from patients that IV nurses couldn’t.

The one thing they never seemed to get was that you should NEVER EVER PROBE with a needle. If you don’t get it, don’t jam it around under the skin. You do so much damage. And they never really seemed to care about holding pressure on the puncture site after, meaning half my patients had huge hard black and blue hematomas.

I hate making generalized statements, since there’s some great nurses out there… but the majority of them just seem to suck with needles.

17

Im just glad they finally stopped doing real life Foleys in the classroom. Apparantly they were having a lot of UTI issues. Now the school has “trainging aides”. They look like overpriced dildos to me…

18

Oh please, cathing a male is a no brainer. Try doing it to a 5 foot tall, 750 lb woman with thighs bigger than old growth Redwoods. been there done that. :stuck_out_tongue:

19

Seriously? So the next time I get a nurse who squiggles the thing around in there, I should tell her to stop and try another spot?

20

Damnit, not I have this huge mulit-colored bruise on my arm.

I look like a damn heroin fiend.

Lame!