Even though you are professional and careful -- accidents happen in medical scenarios. Intensive care nurse Rhianna Ferial talks about a needlestick injury she sustained on the job that possibly exposed her to hepatitis C. In this video, she implores her fellow healthcare workers to not be embarrassed and to take care of themselves. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Now, I wanted to talk about my needlestick and just kind of tell you guys what happens because I didn't really have time to talk about it earlier. Basically what happened was I was starting an IV on a patient. Afterwards, I was walking to the sharps container and I was carrying a bunch of stuff that was going to the sharps, and I felt something stick me in my finger. I started bleeding under my glove. I looked down and saw that it was a needle that was actually, like, bent, which was super weird, and sticking through the side of a plastic-like safety cap and it stuck me in my finger.
It was just a really bizarre situation. It wasn't really anybody's fault. I probably should have picked up the needles more carefully. Otherwise, it was kind of like an unpredictable situation, you never expect that to happen.
I put everything in the sharps container, wash my hands, like squeeze the blood out, clean it with alcohol, soap, and water, all that stuff, and told the charge what was going on. Then, they sent me to Employee Help to seek treatment and to go over what I was doing.
I was super supported during the whole situation. Everybody was really great about it, which was really awesome because I was stressed out. Then, I found out shortly after that the patient had hepatitis C and I was even a little more stressed out.
The way that my labs worked is I had it right when it happened, one month out, three months out, and six months out, which is today. I don't know the results from today, but all my other ones have been completely negative so far, so I'm sure the ones from today will be negative as well.
I did a little research on hepatitis C right after it happened, obviously, and I found out that the serum conversion rate in health care workers when they're stuck by like a small, hollow needle is only about 0.3%. That's very, very low. I also found out that after four to eight weeks, the chance of actually getting hepatitis C if your labs have been negative up to that point is extremely low as well. Now, I feel really comfortable. I know my labs are going to come back negative. Obviously, there's like a very, very rare chance they would come back positive, but I highly doubt that will happen.
As soon as I got my one-month labs and they were negative, I felt a lot better about the whole situation. I just want to talk about this because I know there can, kind of be a culture in nursing of shaming a nurse when they're exposed to something, injured, or something happens, because everybody wants to know why it happened, what did you do wrong, how could you have prevented this, and what procedure or protocol did you not follow.
Sometimes bizarre things just happen and you can't prevent or help it. Sometimes there's an emergency. You're running into a patient's room and there's like blood, or throw up, or something going everywhere, and you run in to help that patient. You don't have time to grab your safety equipment because the patient's your priority and you end up getting exposed to something.
There's a lot of different situations that this can happen. I don't like the culture of being shamed for something that's happening to you that's kind of like traumatizing to you. I wasn't shamed at all, but I'm talking about this in general because I know a lot of nurses are scared to report stuff because they don't want to get in trouble, they're embarrassed like to talk to their colleagues about it, they're embarrassed that it happened to them, they're experienced, and they feel stupid that it happened to them.
Honestly, I felt stupid at first. I was like I should have picked up these needles differently. I should inspected them all before I started picking them up and started kind of blaming myself for what happened. But I think it's kind of in our nature to put other people first -- especially our patients, all 100% of your effort is going into that -- that sometimes you can kind of forget about yourself, and that can allow something to splash on you, something like that to happen.
I just wanted to touch on that. Because if you ever get stuck or exposed by something, you really should seek attention and nobody should be making you feel bad about that. I just wanted to say you're not alone if it happens to you. It's probably happened to almost every nurse at some point in their career, so just try not to feel too bad about it and don't beat yourself up over it.