When I was a 3rd year med student rotating on obstetrics, I scrubbed in on a 3AM crash C-section for a woman w/ HELLP syndrome. The baby was saved. As I held a retractor, the tired resident started repairing the uterus wildly & pushed a suture needle through my thenar eminence./1
The patient had a history of IV drug use and was HIV positive. At the time there were only 3 nucleoside analogues approved for HIV/AIDS: AZT, ddI and ddC. (d4T was approved a few months later, and lamivudine would be approved the following year.)/2
I called the hospital's Needle Stick pager and the RN was somewhat reassuring: it was not a hollow bore needle, and I had washed the wound copiously and immediately. They talked me through the uncertainties about prophylaxis. Residents shared their own needle stick stories. /3
Thankfully I didn't seroconvert, though it was an anxious month - made worse by the fact that I did not have health insurance. (It wasn't required back then and I couldn't afford it. A cellulitis I got after another injury was treated with free samples from Urgent Care clinic.)/4
Right now, while we care for patients with COVID - a contagious and potentially lethal disease for which there is not yet a proven highly effective therapy other than good supportive care - I have that same sense of unease that I haven't felt since the mid 1990s. /5
The patients we hematologist-oncologists are used to caring for are not "contagious". Now, if one of us becomes infected, we have the same choice of drugs that may or may not work as back in the AZT/ddI/ddC days./6End
