What's the reject rate for injection needles?

Post date: 2019-02-17 12:10:48
Views: 334
People who have to stick other people with needles for Medical Reasons, and especially people who have to stick themselves with needles, how often do you get a needle that just doesn't go in like normal?

I have to give myself weekly IM injections for the foreseeable future. I've been switching off between my thighs and it usually works OK, but occasionally I get a needle that just Doesn't. Want. To. Go. In. (I use the "I hate pain so I'm gonna just slide this in gingerly, and very slowly" method, rather than the "pretend it's a dart and get it over with" method.)
When things go well, I feel a first poke through the skin, a second poke through something shortly after that, and then I just ease it through whatever's underneath that (fat & muscle, I guess) with no pain (except that time I hit a nerve and jerked the needle back out). But on probably 5-10% of the needles, I can't get through the first or second pokes, and I'm too timid to just stab it. So I swap on a new needle, and that usually fixes it.
Am I just being an overly-sensitive ninny, or are there really differences between (new, 25G) needle tips? I can't see anything obvious, altho the very point of a "bad" needle might be curled back a bit (which I can see being bad at slicing a tiny painless hole in my leg).

Bonus questions for people who have to stick themselves or others:

* I understand that aspirating to check for hitting a vessel is no longer recommended, since the chances of such a hit are really low. But I think I've hit vessels a couple times in a year (based on odd physiological symptoms after those injections, that don't occur most times), so I've taken to doing that check anyway. Do you check? Or does it just not matter for whatever you're injecting? (My injection volume is ~0.7ml, so it's not like I'm mainlining a whole bicycle-pump-load of goop.)

* Most weeks I complete my shot with no blood at all, but once in a while I get a surprising amount of bleeding after pulling the needle out. (To be fair, "surprising" is probably less than 0.1ml, but it's still enough to make my alcohol wipe look like I cleaned up a murder scene.) I'm guessing those times, I've hit (and gone completely through) a small vein, which bleeds a little more than the normal hole in just muscle. Is that a reasonable guess as to what's happening? Any RN-tested tricks to know how to miss veins in this situation?
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