Giving Yourself An IV is BULLSHIT

Giving yourself an IV of medication when you feel like absolute garbage is a nightmare. 

You poke, you prod, you wonder how in the hell people on TV hit that vein every time. The reality is a bucket of tears and black and blue arms that make even your friends wonder about your moral compass.  

The bubbles and swelling left when you finally find and blow a vein throb, and there is always a birdie on my shoulder whispering, “shouldn’t you be better at this by now?”

Occasionally I nail it, hitting the perfect vein in record time so I can return to normal life. Other times it takes hours, random items flying across the room as I begin my fourth episode of Forensic Files to distract myself. 

The bed is littered with bloody alcohol prep pads and needles, syringes of failed saline taunting me as I rest warm compresses on my arms. 

Giving up is not an option. If I don’t want to end up in the hospital I have to get this done, plus each syringe of mixed medication runs a cool $33,000 a dose. 

Yes you heard me correctly. $33,000. 

If I didn’t have both private insurance and third party supplementals to help with drug coverage, I would spend 25-30% of my life on the bathroom floor on pain pills, vomiting into a trash can.  

Is this condition life threatening? Sure. Is it dangerous to give yourself an IV? 100%. Does the medical system care about any of this? Nope. 

So I stab and stab and stab, getting progressively more brutal with myself until I succeed. 

I hate it, but I hate the alternative more so I persist.