My pt the other day was amazingly sweet. He let me try all kinds of things on him. Wait... I didn't mean that in a perverted way. Anyway, He was scheduled to have an upper endoscopy, which is where the doctor will take a tube with a camera on the tip of it and he/she looks down your mouth at your guts. It was pretty cool seeing it for the first time, but I think it would become really boring unless someone was bleeding internally or something. Anyway, it was pretty cool when my patient woke up and I got to tell him I saw his guts (he asked what it looked like). He just laughed. He was pretty funny. I was talking to him before his endoscopy and I told him that his wife seemed like a really sweet lady, and he mumbled on about "yeah, you don't really know her" blah blah blah, and then after the endoscopy he was talking about his wife again and said the sweetest things about her, like, "My wife, she is the most beautiful person I know. She's a much better person than me; she will do anything for anyone, no matter what they have ever done to her." It was the total opposite of what he said about her earlier, maybe it was the drugs? Maybe we should give drugs to every man who things his wife is such a nag.

Anyway, after his endoscopy he decided he wanted the Pneumovax, which is the pneumonia vaccine, so I gave it to him. I've never given an IM injection, only subcutaneous, and man that needle was huge! I was drawing up the medication, shaking, and I kept picking up things and putting them down because I couldn't get my brain to work because all I could think about was that needle is so big, and it's going to go in his arm and wow, that needle is really big. Then, the nurse I was working with says to the patient, "She's done a million of these things. No really, actually it's her first." All I could think was, "Thanks, a billion, for making me more nervous than I already was. If I put this really big needle in crooked or hit his bone, it's your fault!" But I did it, and I did it well. It was actually really easy, and my patient said it barely hurt. He couldn't tell it  was my first time doing it. It didn't even bleed! (Which is a lot more than I could say about my TDAP injection I got a few months back...) My patient was being discharged after his endoscopy, so I got to take out his IV even though I've never been taught how to do it. It's pretty self-explanatory. I felt bad though because he was trying to get dressed and packed, but it kept bleeding everywhere. My nurse kept looking at me like, "What the freak did you do to his hand?". It eventually stopped. I think it was one of the best clinical days I've had because I got to try and see new things. I love learning.