Needle Art

Simon Cancer Center Indianapolis Day 4
The mornings are filled with doctors and family in the afternoon. I am increasing my work load. Now on an IV for a minimum of 4 hours each day to deal with the complications and concerns I can’t imagine how those who are connected 24/7 can cope. The rolling stand and tubing infusing various chemicals represent the miracle of today’s medicine. While devices evolve to new configurations almost daily, our bodies remain the same, generation after generation. Perhaps if they cannot cure cancer, they can add to the uncontrolled cell growth a way to connect to life saving medications forever painless and even fashionably attractive.
The Art of the Stick
Apparently medical schools treat inserting needles with a variety of options. Here at Simon the methods run the gambit. Some draw through the available IV everyone has. This is a restricted method, not allowed on other parts of the hospital. No new holes and fast delivery are certainly advantages. I learned to drink water and other liquids continuously. At 59 I dehydrate very quickly. Without a lot of water in you veins are hard to find. Having never been in a Hospital for more than relatively few hours, during my extended stay I found the removal of blood from veins is as much art as science. Just as I now know never let an angry woman set an IV, I know that there is no apparent established routine for the actual penetration. The build up is always the same. Doododededahdah, the key noise rattles out of the board and the cabinet opens. Packets are gathered. The bar code reader comes out of it’s holder, numbers are punched in. This phase appears to require a lot of concentration. Clearly the profession has been brow beat to death about making errors. OK by me. A small plastic pan or just the hands and pockets are used to convey the needed materials to me, in bed, and placed on my stomach, leg or adjacent to. A survey of vein locations is done. Some look for the crease between fore and upper arm, classic junkie entry point. My left arm crease looks like a small spot of measles. Some like the back of the hand or forearm, chief among them a Caribbean nurse who raised the state of the art Hill Rom air bed to tit level, applied a liberal swath of alcohol that immediately chilled the site, did a patterned rub and likely cited a silent chant and stuck me without my feeling. I always thought they filled syringes, but in the modern era they set a fine needle on a fixture that is butterfly bandaged to you and accommodates mounting an empty cylinder that fills under my blood pressure. Done well there is nothing, done not so well and it amounts to a bee sting. Some took blood from my IV port, as the cancer center was one of the few places you could. While that is no stick, I sensed messing with the IV had some risk that most nurses preferred not to incur.