I Want to Be a Doctor

Dr. Robin: Welcome back to I Want to Be a Doctor or Something. I'm Dr. Robin. I'm here with my friend Jill, a registered nurse.

Jill: Hi, friends.

Dr. Robin: We're two healthcare besties sharing the real, wild, and funny side of medicine for anyone who's thought about a healthcare career. Ready? Let's go.

Dr. Robin: So today we're gonna be doing Never Have I Ever, and Jill, I have a question for you, because never have I ever gotten a needlestick. Have you ever gotten a needlestick?

Jill: I have. I'm so embarrassed to tell that, but I'll tell it.

Dr. Robin: Oh no. Well, don't worry. I'll tell you an embarrassing story too.

Jill: Go for it. Nobody tell on YouTube. Okay, yeah, so I was actually in nursing school, and they drilled into us: don't recap the needles. Don't recap the needles. The first time I got into a clinical setting, in the patient's room, my preceptor was so nice. She was like, “You wanna get the patient insulin? We're gonna do the blood glucose check, and you can administer the insulin.” I'm like, “Oh, okay, yeah.” So we did the glucose check, we drew up the insulin, I gave the shot, went through all the process like that, and then I just recapped it at the end, and it poked me in the finger. She's like, “You never recap the needle.” And I'm like, “I'm so sorry.” So yeah, really, definitely embarrassing. Nothing happened. I was fine, but still, it was a really good lesson that I've learned never, ever to do again, because stuff like that you definitely wanna listen to, for sure.

Dr. Robin: Yeah. Well, someone who's diabetic is the perfect person to do that with, though, because they're so used to being stuck by needles that they probably did not overreact at all.

Jill: No, no. They didn't pay that much attention at all. And it was fine later, and the preceptor talked to me about it, but she knew she didn't really have to go into a lot of details because I had scared myself so much by doing that, because I knew that was like the unpardonable sin to do in clinical settings.

Dr. Robin: Yeah, it really is. We should probably show people who are watching: how are you supposed to recap needles?

Jill: Oh, yeah. You wanna demonstrate, or do you want me to show?

Dr. Robin: Yeah. I mean, if you do have to, like if there's a cap sitting there, you don't go like this. You scoop it, and then you can tap the top or push it against something.

Jill: Yeah, I never had someone teach me that at nursing school, so that would've been good. But we did end up getting the needles later that have the little clip part on the side, and then you just press them on the bed or something like that. But yeah, they told us just to put them immediately in the sharps box. But I like that.

Dr. Robin: That's good. But yeah, it was handy because sometimes as a doctor—for example, when I was doing my anesthesia rotation in medical school—we'd go and give people medication sometimes when they were in the little pre-op rooms, and there wasn't always a sharps container right there, especially in the VA. It was an old, old VA, which has now been torn down, but they didn't have sharps containers everywhere. And so we couldn't put the needle back in our pocket, but you weren't supposed to walk around with a sharp needle waving it at people. So you'd drop the cap on the bed or whatever, and then scoop it, and then tap it against the bed so it's capped again. And we weren't supposed to put it back in our pockets because they didn't want us to mix it up with the used ones, but at least it was capped when we went to carry it over to a sharps container.

Jill: That makes sense. Yeah, but general rule: never recap, which I've seen people recap, and I'm like, ooh. Yeah, it's just really—you're kind of putting yourself in an unsafe situation. And that patient was fine, didn't have any kind of diseases or anything like that, but you just never know. So yeah, you have to be smart with it, for sure.

Dr. Robin: Well, and it's so scary when you hurt yourself in front of a patient especially, because you're like, they can see me, and I feel so dumb. Now, I told you I'd tell you an embarrassing story. You know those little glass ampoules that you have to pop the top off to get the medicine out, but it's all glass, right? So no one had shown me how to do that before. And I was a doctor by then, which just hadn't happened to me as a medical student or resident. I had never opened one of those because nurses usually did it for me. But I was at a private practice. I had a medical assistant, but she and I really worked as a team a lot, so I'd do some things I had not done before. And so I was just gonna snap it off, and no one had told me how. So I just snapped it, and I just sliced through my finger. In front of a patient. And there was blood instantly. And I was so embarrassed. I was beside the patient, and my assistant was talking with her and getting other stuff set up, and you could see her face just be like— And I was like, “I have to get something. I'll be right back.” And I just beat it out of the room. And she came out a couple of minutes later. She was like, “Are you okay?” And I'm like, “Yeah.” She's like, “Do you need stitches?” So yeah, we ended up gluing it, because I was at a doctor's office, right?

Jill: Yeah, so you had the supplies you needed. But yeah, it does always scare me in clinical, too, because even when you know how to open them and stuff, it's just so—you know, the glass is so very thin. It's so easy to snap. I don't know why they still have them in those. It seems like we should've moved past snapping glass open.

Dr. Robin: But for everyone to know, you put a four-by-four gauze over it so you don't hurt yourself. The gauze protects you. But I did not know that. So I told you I did something worse.

Jill: Yeah, I don't know if it's worse, but yeah, that would be embarrassing for sure.

Both: [Laughing]

Dr. Robin: Well, look at us. We both survived a very embarrassing situation. You were a student, which is embarrassing because you're trying to impress people. I was a doctor, so you're supposed to know something.

Both: [Laughing]

Dr. Robin: But I think we all screw up, right? No one bats a hundred.

Jill: Totally.

Dr. Robin: And that's just how it is being a human. And it's fun, you know, getting to know each other and things like that, and getting to know that other people are human too. And we all miss sometimes. As long as everybody's safe, that's all that matters. And if anyone pretends that they're perfect and have never made a mistake, either they are not self-aware at all, or they are lying to you. So don't believe them.

Jill: No, no.

Both: [Laughing]

Dr. Robin: Well, that is it for today. If you want to be a doctor or something else healthcare-related, head over to docrobin-school.com/podcast. That's doc Robin, like the bird, school dot com, for your goodies. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Thanks so much for watching.

Dr. Robin: Bye.

Jill: Bye, friends.