After a COVID vaccine bungle, nurses and doctors had a lot to say about their expertise this week

Wriggle your toes. My sister always told me that when you get an injection, you should wriggle your toes.

She’s been a practice nurse at a GP clinic for decades, and talkback callers sometimes ring me to say that she’s vaccinated all of their babies with barely a yell between them.

When she was a student nurse, I remember her bringing syringes home to our share house to practise her injection technique on oranges, which are apparently a neat approximation of human skin.

The house was soon filled with pierced oranges, none of which you could confidently eat for fear of what she may have plunged inside them.

I don’t like injections, and after a dozen years of almost daily blood tests in my long IVF travails, that dislike has only hardened….