Giving shots to tots

I am now the Vaccination Princess! I was so proud of myself last Thursday because I had given NINE flu shots, but after last weekend, I've completely lost count. I volunteered Saturday at a health fair hosted by one of my instructors at her church, and we provided blood pressure screening, proper hand washing demos, healthy snacks, and vaccinations to the homeless or people with no health insurance.

I started out doing the blood pressure screening and ended up helping with the vaccinations after the second-year nursing students left. We gave free influenza, tetanus/pertussis/diphtheria (TDAP), and pneumonia vaccinations to 61 people, including ourselves. I struggled at first with the syringe because it had a retractable needle; you had to push really hard after the needle was in their arm to get it to retract, and sometimes I would just give up and pull out the needle myself. (No sense beating people up over an inconvenient convenience!) Before the health fair, I would really focus and concentrate on each individual injection, but during the fair I had to be quick and efficient and process paperwork correctly, so I focused less on each shot and more on the overall process. It was such great practice!

My true challenge came when a parent brought in an 18-month-old for his very first flu shot. All of us students shrank back in horror at the prospect of injecting a toddler, so my instructor was going to administer the shot herself. Well, apparently I acted a little too interested in how and where she was going to do it, because suddenly I got nominated! We trooped back into the nursery and the dad and my instructor held the poor kid down while I prepped his chubby little leg. By this point I'd given several shots and thought I had my technique down, but he was very tense from being held down and my needle pretty much bounced off his leg during my first attempt to jab him! This was, of course, very alarming and he started crying and flailing, and somehow I mustered the strength to quickly give him the shot AND get that darn retractable needle to work. Many of my classmates were watching and they said I was bright red the entire time and looked like I was facing the guillotine. But I did it! And the little boy stopped crying immediately afterward, so I don't think I did any permanent damage. About 20 minutes later another parent brought in a child the same age, and guess who had to give him the shot? My instructor said that because I had already done it, she preferred that I be the only one to administer vaccinations to the really small kids. It was quite an honor, but still horrifying all the same. This time everyone wanted to watch, but I had no problems and got the needle in the first try. You'd never guess how firm and dense those little toddler legs are! I had to use way more force than I did with adults!

I'm planning on accompanying a friend of mine to her son's appointment at Dornbecker's Children's Hospital in Portland this week because I really want to see what pediatric oncology is like. That is definitely a field I am very interested in, but I need to find out if I can handle it. Each day I discover that I'm braver than I previously thought, so who knows!