Actually, my job is not as much of a drag now that I'm in the IV room. I definitely have clarity on this - sterile compounding is my niche within the pharmacy world. I wouldn't last long in pharmacy if I was only doing the routine work. There's a few new things I had to learn in the IV room, but the basics are the same. At LVHN, they have a much larger volume of compounding, and there's 4 roles the day shift techs fill. Everyone rotates through the positions of manufacturing, syringes, fill list, and stats.
Most people dislike syringes the most, and I have to agree. In one shift it's very likely you'll do over 1,000 syringes, and it's time-consuming but monotonous. I actually got blisters after training on syringes for a week! The fill list and stat positions are for patient-specific doses that aren't made in a batch. There's a program we use where you take pictures of what you do, and that's how the pharmacist checks your work. For example, I have to make a dose of acyclovir in normal saline. In the dispensing program, I scan the patient label, the normal saline bag, and acyclovir. Then I draw up the correct amount of drug, and take a picture of that syringe beside the vials of drug and the saline bag. Then I inject the drug, seal and label the bag, and take a picture of the finished product. The program also tells you exactly how much drug (in mLs) to draw up, so it's not as critical to do the math, but there's other things we do, like Botox, where you have to do a lot of math.
Botox was something I had to learn how to do. They do quite a lot at LVHN (generally not for cosmetic purposes), and doctors order it in different strengths so we have to figure out things like this: the concentration needs to be 5 units per 0.1 ml, and total dose is 300 units. There's only a few tiny grains of drug per 100 or 200 unit vial, which gets diluted with normal saline. How much saline do you add to the vial to get the correct concentration of 5 units/0.1 mL? There might be 4 or 5 different concentrations and doses to figure out, and it can get confusing pretty quickly. I like the challenge, though!
Relationships between the IV techs are kind of treacherous. Some don't get along, and everyone knows it. Depending who you're with, you'll hear a lot of trash talk about others. I'm mostly quiet because I can't relate to a majority of the things they talk about. By the end of my shift, I'm definitely ready to leave it all behind. Thinking of staying there long-term is not a very happy thought, but I have no other good option so I'm trying to resign myself.
What I'd really like to do is live and work in another country for several months every year. Something that involves writing and reading. 😄 Dreams, dreams, I know.
