The needle-stick incident

Never think that removing a securely capped orange needle after taking ABG is safe. The least expected thing could happen which was the needle piercing past the cap without you realising it. This was the first contaminated needle stick injury that happened to me.

Suddenly, I became the patient, needing someone else to poke and take blood sample from me and yet, I still needed to take the blood sample from the involved patient. I realised that actually nobody knew the process of reporting a needle-stick injury. There's no support whatsoever. You just feel lost. The irony was, there was a flowchart of steps to take after a needle-stick injury on the main board.

Going to A&E, I was still trying so hard to console myself that the risk of catching anything from such a small wound is just 0.3% and at least I've been immunised against hepatitis B. But what about Hep C and HIV? Plus that patient was an Indonesian, status unknown.

I got my first tetanus ID jab. It was quite painful. An MO even asked me if I could clerk my own history but he was nice enough to do it for me in the end.

Transporting my own blood sample to the infectious disease unit was one of the weirdest thing that I've done. At least it only took them 3 hours to process the sample and finally, I got a phone call to confirm that everything was clear. Phew.

I don't know what have I learned from this episode as I've taken all the necessary measures of taking ABGs from whatever limited tools that we have in the hospital. We don't have the safety needle for ABG taking like in the UK. We still heparanise our 1ml or 3 mls syringes ourselves and remove the needle to cap it with a stopper before transporting it to the lab.

I think it's the hassle and lack of support that deters many of my colleagues from reporting needle-stick injuries. I hope that this won't turn into a normal occurrence for me.

Wee Vien's Wedding

 

 10th of March was lovely Wee Vien and Jinn Did's Wedding. Congratulations!

 Dinner that night was really luxurious. It was held at Noble Banquet along Jalan Bukit Bintang. I guess this is still one of the places that you can find sharks fin soup (bottom picture).

 All the lovely ladies.

My next post will be all about food and more food as I've accumulated so many photos and too busy to blog. You all must be wondering what have I been up to lately as I've somehow disappeared from the blogging world. Been busy undergoing surgical rotation. It's tough as we're short of housemen and there's no such thing as shift system here. I really wonder how did I survive when I first joined. Last night's oncall was bad as one of the emergency laparotomy took 5.5 hours. You can actually see me withering away towards the end. The good side of this rotation is, it's always in taxing rotations that you get good bosses to compensate, I don't know why. Somehow that still motivates me a little to get up at 5.30am in the morning to go to work. Haih.....

More to come in the next post. Till then.

The broken elastic band

A little girl pick up an elastic band found lying on the playground.
Happily, she starts playing with it, tugging and pulling, stretching it and watching it recoil to its original shape.
As she plays along, the harder she pulls, amazed at how much she was able to stretch it.
Suddenly, the band snaps and tip of it smacked her hand causing her much pain before it drops to the ground.

Gingerly nursing her injured hand, now left with a red mark, she bends to pick the broken elastic band with the other. Now it's just a useless piece of thin rubber. She tried to tie both ends together, but as soon as she starts to pull, the knot snaps off and she was left with another sharp pain. She then spots a dustbin at the side of the road and throws the broken elastic band away.

I feel like the broken elastic band. Please leave me alone and not stretch me beyond my limit.