Nursing School Bloopers

I had a local police officer come in to the clinic for an office visit, his fee slip said f/u ED, I stupidly assumed this was an ER follow up. So I checked him and asked him about his emergency room visit, he looked at me funny and said "um I was not seen in the ER" turns out he was in for refills on his Viagra for his erectile dysfunction, to make matters worse he thought it was so funny he told the physician, I was very embarassed.

Another time I was assisting our surgeon in a simple lesion removal, when he asked for the specimen container to place the sample in I spilled it all over the floor. The formaldehyde was so strong we had to move the patient to another room to finish suturing him.

I was hanging a new bag of saline and went to pull the tab where the spike goes in to the new bag out and i had a little trouble and resistance. Well lets just say my arm shot out and hit the water pitcher on the bedside table and doused my patient in around 24 oz of ice cold water....he was in good humor about it and joked while i changed his bedding and stuff...i was mortified though

Back when I worked as a CNA, a co-worker and I were boosting a patient up in bed. He was a fairly large guy, and my co-worker was small, so I pulled as much as I could. Apparently she did too because we pulled him hard enough for his head to go OVER the bed's headboard and hit the wall! Luckily it wasn't hard and the patient had a good sence of humor.

Believe it. Most nurses I've known say they've done the same thing. Once. I have. Once. Those who say they haven't...they're either covering up or just haven't had their moment yet.

*raises hand*...It happened to me too. Once.

OMG this just happened to me. I was trying to get a bottle of 3%na acetate off the pole. The previous nurse had the tubing so short on the pump when I pulled the bottle up to get it off the pole the spike came out and at least it didn't totally drown my foot. I was cursing (not out loud) the nurse that did that before me. They did the same thing with the neo drip too. Good lord why would you even think to put the tubing that short?

I do that all the time.... Everyone gives me odd looks.

I am going into my last semester of nursing school, and since I haven't had any bloopers myself yet, I am scared that I will have a major one- Psych and Cardiac clinicals coming up.

I do have bloopers from when I was an anesthesia tech though. My favorite was the day I learned to release the pressure from the pressure bag before unspiking the heparin, never even crossed my mind that I would get a shower. The other- I think it was the same day, I was using a 19g needle to get the air out of an IV bag for a trauma (rapid fluid infuser) and I stuck the needle through the bag and my thumb.

On our Maternity rotation my friend and I stayed late to watch a vag delivery (in the hosp we were at they have a low rate of vag deliveries) We were so excited. But it was an awful experience. So on our last day there our CI let us watch another delivery. My friend was going to give the vit K and I gave the erythromicin. Well when my friend went to open the ampule it shattered every where. There was glass in the bassinet, which luckily was still empty, and on the floor, and she cut herself. She was horrified. They had to get a new bassinet, and the father was looking at us like we had 10 heads.

I was working night shift in the ICU. We weighed and bathed the patients on nights. (Back then, the beds did not have scales in them.) We had to turn the patient to place a rolled-up full body-length sling under her, then turn her again to unroll and attach it to an overhead scale. Once when we were turning a somewhat large elderly female patient, my friend and fellow nurse Eileen got a phone call and had to leave. I blurted out, jokingly, "Oh, sure, thanks for leaving me holding the bag." The patient fortunately had a sense of humor and laughed with us.

Many years ago when I was in nursing school a classmate came to me in a panic. Our frazzled nursing instructor told her to "Put 10 drops of this into orange juice and go give it to your patient". The student did as she was told.
Then my classmate came to me, clutching the bottle from which she had given the 10 drops of liquid. It was labeled Potassium Iodide on the front, and displayed a large skull and crossbones on the back label. The poor girl's hands were shaking and she wanted to know if I knew anything about why our nursing instructor would tell her to do this. I told her I thought I remembered something about avoiding thyroid storm with iodide, but I wasn't sure. I told her that she needed to contact our instructor right away. Our instructor carried a walkie-talkie so that she could stay in contact her students, and everyone on the floor (including the patients) could hear bits and pieces of our communication. So my classmate goes to the base unit and yells "Mrs. Walker, come quick. I think I may have just poisoned someone!" Within about 10 seconds all the call lights on the floor were going off!