If you have ever spent time sitting in your doctor’s office with a nurse hovering over you struggling to find a vein in your arm to take blood, you can likely relate to the anxiety and dread that the process invokes.
One Abingdon man finally had enough of his negative experiences with needles and decided to do something about it. He set out to make the process of vein finding easier for everyone in his healthcare facility.
Kenny Moore is a 57-year-old man who was diagnosed almost two years ago with Ulcerative Colitis. Ulcerative Colitis is similar to Crohn’s disease and affects a person’s intestine or colon. This disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that can have symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome and the effects of the disease left Moore feeling continuously exhausted and dehydrated.
Moore decided to participate in a clinical trail in which he had to travel to a general hospital in another town every two months and receive IV infusions.
Mr. Kenny Moore would have extreme anxiety about his infusions, which was exacerbated by the fact that he has veins that are very difficult to find. He had a lot of anxiety and fear around blood and needles so when his nurses would put in a cannula (or a thin tube for an infusion) for his infusion, he got so upset the first time that the nurses thought that he was having a heart attack.
After all of these experiences, Mr. Moore started to realize that he was not the only person who experiences these kind of problems. He did some research and found out that there is a machine that will show all the veins in an area of a patient’s body, which in turn makes it very easy for a nurse to find the best vein. It is called the Accuvein AV400.
The hospital that Mr. Moore goes to contains patients who are all receiving infusions and the process for receiving a cannula can cause a lot of anxiety for patients.
With the help of friends, Mr. Moore, who is a part of the Oxford Masons, fundraised over $5,400 US dollars to purchase the helpful machine for the hospital.
He praises and thanks his organization, the Freemasons of Berkshire, for greatly assisting in raising the money for the device, and he is happy to see the positive results of the machine for other patients.
As many as 20 patients a day are assisted with the machine, which makes the process of taking blood a little less stressful for them.
Read the original article here.
