Ouch!

We had to go to hospital with baby J yesterday. We signed up for this double-blind study where they were testing to compare the effectiveness of the vaccines produced by the drug company, and hence could get baby J’s whole lot of vaccinations FOC. That really helped us to save quite alot of money, but the only drawback was they needed to take blood at the end of the study to test the vaccines effectiveness. To our horror, we found out that we needed to take 5 ml (one whole tube!) of blood from the boy. The nurse took at look at baby J’s legs and hands and decided she was not up to taking blood from him. So she asked hubby to take the blood, but hubby wasn’t very confident and decided to ask his senior consultant to take the blood (he used to work in that hospital), and brought him up to the anesthesia office to do it. Then this whole bunch of his ex-colleagues surrounded baby J and started prodding him to check for possible veins to take blood from. Baby J started crying so they distracted him by blowing bubbles in the office, and decided that they would try to use the vein-viewer (this machine helps to show up the veins under the skin) to look for veins. We had to gown ourselves before going to use the machine, and after shining the green lights all over the boy’s hands and feet (which helped to distract him too) the SC concluded that it would be almost impossible to take that much blood from the boy as he had almost no veins visible, and offered to call the person in charge of the study to see if we could be exempted from taking the sample. In the end, they slathered local anesthetic on the possible spots and we went to see the paediatrician first.

The paediatrician offered to try to take the blood and actually managed to hit a vein with the needle. The little boy cried a little when the needle went in, but after that was actually very co-operative and sat still while they dripped the blood into the tube. However, they only managed to get 3.5 ml before the blood started to coagulate. Poor fellow, having to endure all this! But he really behaved like a champ!