I had just finished drawing blood on a patient at the VA hospital in Houston during my student clinical rotations, and I was looking at the back part of the needle, the part that actually goes into the tubes. Those tubes have a nice rubber top that gets punctured so the blood can flow into them, but the back of the needle apparatus has a blunt tipped safety protector. Baffled as to how that dull tip pushed through the stopper so easily, I reached out my gloved finger to see what material that tip was made of. 

And that’s how I spent six months scared I had Hepatitis C, which I thankfully do not. It turns out it is made of the thinnest rubber in the world. It’s basically a tiny condom for a needle. In this case for a needle full of another person’s blood. The tip punctured my glove and my fingertip like the tiny spear that it is.  I was standing in the hallway outside a patient’s room, having done just about the stupidest thing possible. I am not going to lie to you: I did not report the needle stick to my instructor because I was too embarrassed. I did everything else: I squeezed my finger to express blood, I washed my hands in antiseptic (a billion times), and got the labs run on myself and my patient to make sure I wasn’t going to die. 

I can still think about how that millisecond of stupidity could have ruined my life. The pit in my stomach comes back writing it down.