My beloved wife and I give each other allergy injections every week. It’s usually not that bad, two quick jabs for each of us and it’s over.
The last time we replenished our needles that changed.
We couldn’t figure out what the hell was different at first. A few times my beloved tried to stick me and the needle just. Wouldn’t go in.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It just… didn’t pierce,” they said in perplexed frustration.
It grew too frequent to ignore though and we started voicing it to each other. Weren’t the needles easier to use before? Didn’t they hurt less? That’s when we started to realize it was indeed different needles. We speculated that they’d changed distributors. We regretted restocking so many packs of these horrible new needles.
Today we went in for a vial test. That’s where they make sure the new antigens react as expected so you have medical supervision in case anaphylaxis happens. It hurt more than usual.
As we were leaving we stopped by the front desk with our doctor in tow.
“We need more needles,” my wife said.
As the doctor reached into their supply to grab them for us I piped up, “Except, did you guys change suppliers…? The first ones we got were fine but the last ones were… thicker, it felt like.”
The receptionist and our doctor immediately became flustered. Our doctor started apologizing profusely. “It’s all my fault, I’m so sorry. I’m in charge of ordering and the regular needles were like $100 more per box so I got one gauge thicker because I didn’t think it would be a big difference.”
With her face in her hands she said, “it’s a big difference. You’re like the fourth people to complain. We had a whole staff meeting about it. I’ll never get that gauge again. We’re using the thicker ones here in clinic but these new needles are the right gauge.”
We were both laughing and trying to accept her apology and assure her things were okay. I’m so excited to have good needles again but tragically we have more of the chunky ones to get through first. But today I learned that one gauge of thickness makes a very big difference for injections.
