My Weekend Sucked

If anyone thinks their job sucks, I may have a story that could make you feel better. For one thing, I had to work the entire weekend, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Guess what happened to me early Monday morning? I was doing my normal morning routine, drawing blood from my patients for their daily lab values. I had just finished transferring the blood from the syringe into the test tube. The needle on the end of my syringe had a "safety cap" on it. You're supposed to snap this cap into place when you are finished with the needle, so that you don't accidentally poke yourself with it, which could then expose you to someone else's blood. So I snapped the cap into place, and the next thing I knew, blood was splattered across the front of my favorite pair of scrubs, on my face, and I felt a drop hit me in the eye. I got someone else's blood in MY EYE! Gross! I guess there was a drop of blood on the end of the needle, which then flicked off the end of it when the cap snapped into place. Damn "safety caps." Who makes these things anyways? Leave it to me to find a way to make a safety cap dangerous.

After taking a deep breath, trying to hold together my composure, I went and told the charge nurse, who then had to send me down to the ER for "treatment." My treatment was flushing my eye out with tap water. I'm pretty sure all that did was irritate my eye even more. They then had me fill out some stupid paperwork and offered me anti-HIV drugs. I declined the drugs because I felt pretty certain that I was dealing with a pretty clean patient. Plus, the doctor classified it as a "low-risk exposure." And, those drugs make you feel like complete and total crap. So then an hour and a half later, I returned to my unit, where I had to rush around and complete all the work that I was now even more behind with. See? Don't you feel better about your job now?

Tuesday I slept all day, and then we went out for a fabulous sushi dinner. After dinner we went to our favorite neighborhood bar, where I then proceeded to drink a very large amount of whiskey. I guess I was trying to kill whatever I had been exposed to with alcohol.

Yesterday morning I woke up at 8am, wishing the alcohol really had killed me. By the amount of headache pain and GI distress I was enduring, I think it came close. That afternoon, I had to go to an Infectious Disease specialist at the Brigham just to check me out and make sure everything was OK. They had tested the patient whose blood I was exposed to for HIV and hepatitis. Luckily, all the tests came back negative (that was for you, Nashvegas). So I'm pretty much home free, besides the grossness of knowing that someone else's blood was in my eye.

After my doctor's appointment, Dave and I had a bite to eat. We were then inclined to take a lovely stroll through Beacon Hill and then over to the Boston Common. This place is so cool. We don't have anything like this in Atlanta, and it's just not fair! So it's decided:

Dear Friends and Family,
Boston is so much cooler than Atlanta. Please move up here stat!
Love, Bean