Hi all, I’m a new phleb at a smaller clinic and I’ve been on my own for about 2 months now. I had a patient come in today and she did the usual “this is the arm they always go for, I’ve got two pretty good ones” so I take a look and sure enough she has two good ones over there. I go for the bigger juicer one first and it rolls, she says it does that sometimes but she’d rather me retry than try and adjust because it hurts. So I take the needle out, get reset up, and anchor the needle really good this time. I stick again and she flinches a little, nothing crazy, I stick the tube on and she says “I think you hit a nerve, there’s a tingling feeling in my fingers” so I instantly take the needle out, like so fast I got like a single drop of blood in the tube. She sees I got a drop and says “if it was going why did you take the needle out?” I told her if it was irritating a nerve I didn’t want to keep the needle in. After that she just got up and left, didn’t even let me wrap her up.
I just feel really bad because she was really nice to me up until I hurt her, reasonably, and I’m just really worried about the fact that I did hurt her. I’ve never hit someone’s nerve before and it really rattled me. Is this a normal experience? Is it just something that happens or should I have known somehow and not gone back in the same area? :(