Hands

On Sunday morning, I cut the fleshy tip off my right thumb with a pair of very sharp and none-too-clean kitchen scissors while harvesting some arugula in the backyard.

This was certainly a traumatic enough event (for example, when I changed the bandage that evening, I discovered that the clot had formed in the gauze so I had to pull the clot off, causing me to puke up bile in one side of the kitchen sink while fresh blood dripped from the end of my thumb into the other), but this isn't what this post is about.

As a petroleum geologist whose main tools were my brain and some fancy computer programs, my hands were sort of incidental to my professional endeavors. Thumbs are useful for typing but not critical.

But for a veterinarian? Hands are not only tool holders, they can be the tools themselves.

Today the vet invited me to perform a blood draw from the jugular on her dog. You need your fingers, all of them, both hands, to do this properly because a jugular blood draw is done by feel.

While the tech is holding the dog upright with its head lifted up, you press your thumb across its neck and look for the jugular to fill with blood--you can see a slight pulsing as you press and release your thumb. The jugular is located lateral to the trachea but it can be anywhere from right next to it to a few centimeters away. I was surprised at how large it is.

WIth the index finger of your other hand, you tap across the neck. The vein will feel like a rubber band while the non-vein bits will feel harder. After you visually mark the location, with this same hand you insert the needle and manipulate the plunger, usually moving the needle around, mostly in a bit or out a bit, to get it in the vein. All of this is done one-handed because the thumb of your other hand is still pressing down on the neck to make the vein pop out.

In short, both thumbs are rather critical to this mundane veterinarian task. While techs usually draw blood, this is still a routine task for the vets too.

Fortunately the jugular is present on the left and right sides of the trachea, and thankfully I am left handed so I was pressing on the dog's neck with my fat, bandaged thumb while manipulating the needle and syringe with my uninjured left hand. But I couldn't feel anything with that thumb through the wad of gauze and tape.

This made me realize how important my hands are going to be in my new career. Now, let's not get carried away and equate this with pianist hands or hand-model hands, but surgeon hands might not be too far off the mark.

This was a good lesson learned the hard way. My right thumb will be flat on the end after it heals but I hope it will remind me to take much more care in the future.