Tiny Cut

It’s so tiny. You can barely see it there on the side of my finger. Yet it’s implications are huge and the very sight of it terrifies me. The barely visible cut hurts but it’s a psychologically based hurt…not a valid physical pain. I try to tell myself it is just part of the job and that all the tests will come back negative. In the meantime, I am left with a million scenarios and scary possibilities.

“Go home and hug your family,” my captain told me when we got back to the station after the cardiac arrest call that day. “It will be ok. Just go home and try to relax.”
I haven’t relaxed. There are times that the tiny cut drifts to the back of my mind…only to resurface a short time later. I don’t know how I got the cut. I had my gloves on. What I do know is that when I dropped my patient off in the ER that day, there was a lot of blood in my lefthand glove…and most of it wasn’t mine. At some point between Point A and and my patient’s bloody airway, something punctured my glove and gave me that cut.
I probably wouldn’t have felt as terrified by the entire incident but the look of fear in those who were with me did nothing to bolster my confidence. I was quickly handed a sponge full of surgical germicide soap. They checked me into the hospital like a regular patient. They drew my blood. They told me the likelihood that I would contract anything was low. They told me what the next several months of blood work would be like. Then they sent me home.

The first phone call came a few short hours later. The initial bloodwork was negative. But that didn’t mean I was in the clear. Some of the most terrifying bloodborne pathogens take up to 6 months to rear their ugly heads. So I am left to wait and hope for the best.