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Anxiety with performing procedures
Does anyone have advice for reducing procedure anxiety? I am a first year radiology resident just starting to do minor procedures (LPs, line removals etc) and had minimal experience with procedures besides my surgery rotation third year of medical school (and I was also pretty nervous during that rotation).
My nervousness sometimes makes my hands shake to the extent that it’s hard to manipulate the needles, which then ruins my confidence with the rest of the procedure. The distress is causing me to spend a lot of time researching non-procedural specialties and wondering if DR was the right choice. -
4 Replies
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Stabilize your hand by resting it on whatever you’re sticking, if you’re hovering your hand it’s going to be really hard to be precise and steady. Same concept applies for ultrasound and ultrasound guided biopsies. You want stability.
Understand what you’re doing and the risks of it and you will be much more comfortable. If you’re doing a thyroid FNA for example the needle can go almost anywhere in the adjacent area and you aren’t going to do any damage bc its so small. Or the line removal you mentioned. If you take your time and have an adequate dissection you can’t really mess it up, worst thing you have to do is hold a little pressure.
People are always worried about snapping lines when removing them. Take a tunneled line, tie it around a chair or table and try to snap it. It’s really freaking hard.
Finally, there are tons of DR jobs with little to no procedures so if it truly ends up being a make or break thing there would still be plenty of opportunities
Once you do enough of anything it becomes second nature. Just like you had no idea what you were doing the first time you looked at a head CT, an LP isn’t much different.-
If you dont have any contraindications, a little propranolol.
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Thanks for the advice! After a bit more experience it seems like confidence is more of the issue than anything, and that’s been slowly improving with time.
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I had similar issues myself and to this day still don’t like to do procedures.
Typically we get anxious because we’re afraid of messing up. To help quell the anxiety you have to try to focus less on what can go wrong, and instead focus on what you do know and what you’re doing in the present moment.
Research the procedure and how to do it ahead of time, watch youtube vidoes, familiarize yourself with the anatomy. Doing those things and being present will help reduce the anxiety. Also don’t forget to breathe and take a deep breathe when you feel anxious to help reduce stress.
At the end of the day if you still don’t like doing procedures there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find a job with minimal or none required. Best of luck!
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