Are there any doctors or nurses on here? Technical question

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I was being a dunderhead tonight and accidently opened two syringes. I take prescription hydroxycobalamine which my dr taught me to inject at home, by the way, so don't anybody be getting any wrong ideas. I know the syringes are suppose to be sterile in the packaging. But does it really pose that big of an infection risk if I put the extra syringe back in the packaging, shut it in a drawer and use it next week? I didn't touch the tip or pull the stopper.

Please advice.

Thank you!

I'm not a doctor (I think I might be a nurse, though), but word on the streets is that you can sterilize the needle with rubbing alcohol.

I'm not a doctor or a nurse. IV drug addict will use bleach to sterilize a needle. Sucking bleach into the needle. Then many times in sterile water.

Other iideas pressure cook it for 15 minutes or oven bake at say
250 F for 15 minutes.

I'm not a doctor or anything, but don't drug addicts always use the same needles over and over again? I would think you'd be pretty safe just using the thing.

Bleach and rubbing alcohol on something you're eventually going to be sticking into a vein (I assume)? Probably good advice, but it kind of freaks me out to think about it. lol.

Iunno about heat either. Might end up cracking it.

Guys its not the needle. It's the syringe I am talking about. The thing that holds the liquid that you attach the needle to.

I don't care what drug addicts do. Those people are crazy and many get themselves infected. This is a prescription med. I just don't like wasting syringes because those along with the needles are expensive.

I don't think any of you are medically trained.

Maladoror I can't help but laugh everytime I see your avatar. Nice one.

Antiseptics don't really compare to the radiation treatment those things probably get when they are made. I would probably avoid using it unless you are SURE nothing as happened to muck it up. You could wait until you see your doctor again. And as for boiling: boiling is good enough for something you eat, but anything you eat gets dropped into a pool of hydrochloric acid before it goes anywhere near your bloodstream, big difference when you are injecting.

Yeah i was meaning needle and syringe interchangable. I did plant
tissue culture and everything must be sterile or you will be growing
micororagnism instead of a clone plant. I used syringes some times
to transfer things I just routinely put items I used all in a pressure
cooker for 15 minutes (get hotter than the boiling point of water and hence can destroy even bacterial spores).

Plant material that are cloned and cut to size with a sterile scaple and then washed in a series of diffferent chemicals (bleach, soap,
alcohol, etc). This is assuming that the micro-organism are only on the surface.

My opinion is the bleach method will work fine. But at the same time
noway I would do it to a needle I was using (like how expensive can they be! ).

I was a medical orderly during my conscription days... rule of thumb is... if it's out of the package... it's no longer sterile... get a new one

I worked in the family vetrinary for 8 years, and the surgeon was heavy on sterilization.

I handled needles EVERYDAY.

If it was ME. I would not worry. Nothing is going to crawl up in there. The alcohol will sterilize. And if you are over concerned put the package in a ziplock and walla!

If it dropped in your toilet-BAD
If it dropped on your floor-not good but sterilizable
If it got the outer packaging opened on purpose-you did the right thing by protecting it from contaniments.(sp-oh gosh im losing my spelling mind)

there is only one 100percent effective way......

Maybe I'll just throw it away. It's just hard to get more and I'm short on supplies anyway. For whatever reason the dr doesn't write me a script for the syringes maybe because they are expensive. They order my med from a compounding pharmacy then I get it from them and the nurse stuffs my pockets with syringes and needles then tells me to keep quiet as I walk past the office manager. So apparently its expensive and they aren't suppose to be giving away free stuff. The old nurse is gone now and not sure if the new nurse will be as generous.

I don't even have enough needles anyway so not sure what I will do about that one. Well they didn't have enough last time she gave me what they could spare. I was using the same needle to draw from vial as inject and she said that must really hurt using a dull needle. So she gave me little needles to draw with but I'm out of those and only have the longer injection needles.

Pharmacy technician with tons of IV experience.

Technically, you should throw it away. But realize, that professional people generally make IV's and draw up syringes well ahead of time in anticipation of need. So, if I were to take your drug and squirt it into a bag of saline several hours in advance, then any germs and bugs would have a chance to brew in there and multiply before the dose ever was given. I'd also be doing it under an IV hood with filtered air with my hair under a bouffant cap, shoe covers over my shoes, and my hands and arms scrubbed to the elbows.

People who give themseleves shots at home (i.e. diabetics) don't draw up their doses in a sterile and clean environment. I've worked with diabetic pharmacy techs that re-use the same syringe and needle until the needle becomes blunt and hurts. That takes several days of continued use and they NEVER sterilized anything in between. I wouldn't recommend that - I think that's taking unnecessary risks for relatively cheap syringes. Still, you're not drawing it up under ultra-sterile conditions so it's not going to be ultra-sterile no matter what precautions you take.

I wouldn't think that it was a big deal if you sucked up some alcohol in it just to make sure there is nothing wrong with it. Like I said, you're not going to draw up your medication and then put in some bag of IV fluid where bugs would flourish. Just don't do anything stupid like blow on it to make the alcohol dry (you'd be surprised how many people do that - think about the germs in your mouth and you realize how stupid it is). Make sure the alcohol dries before you use the syringe too, because it will hurt like hell otherwise.

It's just my opinion that it's no big deal to use it if you have kept it clean. If something I said doesn't make sense or whatever, let me know.

I was going to google for a solution and found this interesting study of syringe reuse in surgical units:

http://www.cja-jca.org/cgi/content/abst ... f_ipsecsha