Win some lose some

I've been kind of ill over the weekend. I woke at 5am on sunday with searing pain in my back, bang over the loin, which didn't really go away all sunday and prevented both significant movement and sitting still - so basically i just lay in bed and fidgetted all day. Frustrating. Whole history sounded rather renal colicky when I put it all together but I'm in denial about that!

Anyway, today I stayed in bed in the morning and took a lot of painkillers (co-dydramol, mmmm) till I was able to get up and move about, then I went to the hospital for the afternoon. Ended up staying till about 7pm with two of the F1s as it all started to get busy at about 4pm - how annoying when that happens! The good thing was I got to do lots - lots of bloods, anyway, and an ECG.

Most of the bloods were successful, but there's this one lady on the ward whose veins are becoming my nemesis! The thing is, every time her exceptionally needle-phobic daughter is visiting, I seem to be approaching with a tray full of needles with which to stick her, and the daughter goes a bit green and has to leave...today it happened 3 times. First off I stuck her for venous bloods and couldn't get a drop, despite using several different kinds of needle - it's not that she doesn't have veins, it's just that none of them bled or stayed still enough for me to get anything significant out of them. This irritated me no end, because I don't usually miss bloods, and at this stage I get the panicky oh-no-in-a-couple-of-months-I-won't-have-backup feeling, and I'm starting to feel like the more I miss the more likely I am to miss and so I lose confidence. So stupid.

Anyway, no sooner had I stuck her and missed, and gone back to the F1s with my tail between my legs, than she needed flippin' ABGs. D'oh! By this time in the evening I'd already got ABGs of a guy in one of the siderooms perfectly successfully and was feeling pretty confident, and sure enough, once I had placated the needle-phobic daughter and apologised for disrupting visiting time once again, I got blood pretty easily.

Went to analyse the sample and it was VENOUS. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Tail between legs again...better get the ECG machine and do that instead while someone else does the ABG, even I can't screw up an ECG.

I know everyone has good days and bad days, and the fact that I wasn't feeling 100% today anyway probably didn't help, but it doesn't stop me beating myself up about being crap at simple things. Tomorrow, I WILL do better.

Thank goodness my rather smug fellow shadowing student had scampered off home by then - I'm sure he would have had a good gloat. He announced in a meeting that he thinks women are less intelligent than men, which is not the best thing to say when two of our registrars are (very scary and intimidating and) female! I'm trying not to rise to his big-headed comments and just get on with it all. Grrrrrr again.

Enough of my down-on-myself rambling, I'm going to bed or I won't be able to think straight tomorrow let alone cannulate straight!