Flu shot

[cjsmith]

OW.

I barely felt the flu shot when it was administered. (It was an injection of inactivated virus, not the FluMist thing with attenuated. I suspect the tech was skilled.) But now, oh MAN does that shoulder ache. Every year I forget about this part. I'm glad I got it in my left arm. I'm mousing with my right.

She used a 25ga needle. The ones I use for Duchess, my diabetic cat, are 30ga, so I know what those look like; what I barely felt was bigger than those. Well done.

Duchess doesn't seem to mind hers a bit, but I'm still wondering if I can't develop some of that skill, that deftness used by good needle-wielders to lessen the sting. I have a great opportunity to practice, right?

Comments

[platypus]

Some doctors just don't have the touch, do they? I wish I knew what it was. My flu shot was a bit painful this year, but I didn't have much bruising afterward. Sometimes I barely feel them, during or after.

I had a dental assistant once who gave completely painless shots, and I complimented her on it -- she said it must just be a quirk of her technique interacting well with my anatomy, since not everybody said that to her! Sadly I had to leave that practice, because the dentist was awful, but I really regretted having to lose the assistant.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I wish I knew what it was, too. Sometimes it's probably just luck: the specific injection site just happens to be less full of nerve endings. But man, some of those folks are good.

I had to get an MRI with contrast injection a while back. The critical thing about an MRI is that the patient not move, and when a needle gets waved anywhere near me, I do the whole cold-sweat fan-myself fidget-like-crazy the-world-goes-gray thing. This one person was so deft -- and/or I was so lucky -- I honestly could not feel the injection AT ALL. Boy was I impressed.

[platypus]

Oh, and about needle-waving -- a good dentist will not let me catch a glimpse of the needle at all, and give me enough warning to close my eyes when they're going to anaesthetize me. Most of them seem to know exactly where my field of view ends, and are very deliberate about staying out of it. My endodontist has not got that kind of finesse -- even after I specifically asked him to give me some room and not be all pushy and needle-wavey -- and I really hope I won't be needing any more root canals, because I don't think I'll be going back.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yikes. Yeah, I'm usually pretty firm about requesting to have my eyes shut for the whole thing, lying down if it's going to be a bad one (blood draws often end up this way because they take longer), and that sort of thing. Once an Army specialist was told all this and pretty much ignored me. He did a blood draw, told me to move on to the next station, and I opened my eyes on three nice test tubes. I passed out right at his feet and gummed up the whole intake line until they could pull me aside. Served him right, the nitwit!