Stabbing Classmates

We recently got to draw blood from our fellow classmates for the first time!  It was quite exciting!  At first I was a little concerned that my partner had dark skin, so I might not see his veins, but I was relieved to find that his veins were quite enormous.  I could have probably done it my eyes closed - okay, that's a stretch.  But it was pretty funny nervous I was, and how my partner was even more nervous.  As I was going to stab him with the needle, his arm kept on drawing farther away. Haha. And when I was pushing the glass tube into the back of the needle so that the tube can fill with blood, I might have moved the needle a bit (you'd be surprised how difficult it was to push the tube in), and that caused some squirming.  Sorry-oh!  When it was my turn, it was done spectacularly! Woot!  Well...almost.  When our demonstrator showed us how to do it, he pulled out the needle along with the tube (so not the tube first), so it ended up with some blood dripping about.  Sorry again!  But at least it wasn't as bad as what happened to some other classmates...

One classmate forgot to untie the tourniquet before taking the needle out, which resulted in a blood squirting everywhere (well, not as bad as kill bill), but it was quite surprising.  And later, the vein bulged so much the bandaid over it looked like a mini hill.  There were even more unfortunate stories of classmates who's veins were too small that their partner had to poke in their arm multiple times.  But it was all in vain (no pun intended) - even the professor wasn't able to draw any blood from them.

Anyhow, overall, it was fun - I doubt we'll really ever draw blood when we become doctors, but I guess it's a good skill to know.