crap...am I in huge trouble???

[Rnis]

So im in orientation and I started the sink to warm up the water and got called out of the room...........you guessed it I forgot and when i came back 5- 10 minutes later the entire hospital room was COVERED in water. We called house keeping and cleaned it up it took about 20 towels and i thought it was all over but then another patient started having water seeping in....so we called maintenance but then it was change of shift so i left. I just assumed that the sink had the secondary drain ....bad assumption. I feel like a complete idiot and am worried im going to get fired over my stupid mistake.

[Twinmom06, ASN, APN]

xt - I've seen you tell this story a few times and every time I laugh till I cry!

[Libitina]

Wow! I love these stories!

A friend of mine did EXACTLY the same thing you did. She went to the substerile to soak some instruments in Klenzyme before putting them in the autoclave. Our OR sinks are pretty large and it takes FOREVA to fill them. She was called back into the OR and promptly forgot about the running water...until someone was walking by the OR and saw water seeping under the door and into the hallway!

Being the creative problem solver she is, my friend quickly asked the scrub nurse to throw off the unused suction tubing from the sterile field and hooked it up to the little do-dad that we use to soak up fluid during an arthroscopy case. Problem solved!

The methyline blue stories cracked me up. I thought I was the only one! A few years ago, I was drawing up Lymphazurin at the beginning of an axillary node dissection case, and nobody told me that you should NEVER put any air into the vial first. Well, I did. I carefully slid the needle out of the vial while keeping the vial at eye level to ensure I had gotten every single precious drop...and PFFFFFTTT! Blue hands, blue floor, blue scrubs. Looked like I had murdered a Smurf. The scrub nurse couldn't stop laughing. After she caught her breath, she said, "Canes, please go look in the mirror." Oh yeah. I looked like I had the Smurf Measles. Nobody kept a straight face when they looked at mine!

You won't get fired. Your pride might get fired for a while though!

I asked a student to draw up some methylne blue for me in the next room under the supervision of my co-worker as I was still scrubbed. I heard a crash and an almighty shriek! co-worker came in wetting herself. The poor student had somehow caused the hypo to drop off and managed to spray blue absolutely EVERYWHERE. She still had blue freckles and hair the next day. The wall will no doubt remain blue until it is painted again. Even alcohol gel doesn't get that stuff off!

[dirtyhippiegirl, BSN, RN]

Did she hook up to the compressed air instead of the oxygen in the wall? Yellow instead of green? I have seen it done.

Makes sense! Poor girl was absolutely mortified and didn't want to talk about it so I didn't bring it up again. It was pretty neat 'tho. One of those things you wish you could have taped and uploaded to youtube.

xtxrn - "mobile birth control" is hilarious!

[annietart]

Oh man! thanks for making me laugh everyone.

Now I won't feel quite so klutzy when I trip over the dynamap on my way down the hall!

I did get sprayed with liquid multivitamin once but that was because of an ill-fitting syringe on a nasogastric feeding tube. I flipped because I thought it was residual and the poor nurse was mortified. I just laughed after I found out it was just a vitamin. I stunk to high heaven though.