Nursing School Bloopers

Originally Posted by Loodlow

I was so naive!!! During my OB rotation, when doing fundal massage in the OB recovery room, I exclaimed "This is amazing! The more you rub it the harder it gets!" EVERYONE in the recovery room---patient, doctor, grandparents, instructor, looked like their eyes were going to pop out. I honestly had no clue why.

If it makes you feel better, when I first got out of school I worked for an OB-GYN, and an OB pt called to ask if she could use her vibrator (she had been in that day for vaginal bleeding). I right away said, "NO!!! You might vibrate something loose... like your baby!"

Imagine my surprise... STILL am not sure how to use one of those things...

Here's my embarrassing student-nurse story:

It was the first term of second year, and I was about to do my first catheterization, with my instructor and five or six other students in the room. The patient, thank God, was a fairly fresh post-op who was still pretty knocked-out from the anesthetic, so he didn't really care about all of us being in there, but after I got all my supplies, washed my hands, and gloved up I discovered something I hadn't counted on: I couldn't find his penis. He was elderly and obviously had never been particularly large, but what he lacked in the endowment department he more than made up for in pubic hair, and to complicate matters his scrotum was so swollen he looked as though he were sitting on a soccer ball.

I looked at my instructor, Vicky, as if to say "Now what?", but she was standing at an angle where she couldn't see what I was dealing with, and she urged me on: "Grasp the shaft with your non-dominant hand, then expose the meatus........." Well, how the heck was I supposed to say out loud that I couldn't FIND it?! Luckily, I happened to glance back at the patient, who mumbled something along the lines of "Here" and showed me where it was located In the meantime the other students were literally crimson with suppressed laughter, and I still had to insert the darn Foley.......The instructor was getting a little upset with me because I didn't seem to be, uh, grasping the situation, and her voice got louder as she demonstrated the proper way to hold the penis while inserting the catheter with the dominant hand. Then she moved around to manually assist me, saw why I was having so much trouble......and made me continue anyway.

Finally I managed to grab onto the poor man, and it took what seemed like forever to get the cath all the way in.......my fellow students were all but rolling on the floor, and Vicky was yelling "Come on, push it in, push, push, push!!" The worst part was when I kept losing my grip on the penis....with its meager dimensions covered in K-Y, it kept slithering out of my hand, and I must've had to start over six or seven times before I finally hit paydirt. By this time the sweat was literally pouring off of me, I was out of breath, and my classmates were barrelling out the door into the hallway, where I could hear them howling with laughter as Vicky told me, "That's probably the worst catheterization I've ever seen---but you did it!"

It was also probably the hardest one I ever did; after that, catheterizing other patients was a snap, and I wound up being the first in my class to be allowed to perform this task independently. But until the day we graduated, I was teased unmercifully about that day and hailed with the Catheter Queen Salute, which was a hand signal reminiscent of the way I'd kept flailing away in my futile efforts to hold onto that poor patient's manhood.

This week in gerneral has been a blooper. I opened my mouth about all of the procedures I had not done and wanted to do before graduation...I think I got to do them all....Today, I planned, would be error proof. I was in my patient's room giving her meds via NG when my instructor walks in and says, "You did give the Dilantin p.o, right?" I just stared blankly at the tube watching the Dilantin go down...She got the clue and suctioned it out, clamped the tube and took me to the hallway. I could have cried. I had looked at the dosages and meds carefully, but ASSUMED they were all via NG. Dilantin was a new order and was p.o. (not sure why?) Of course, never assume....NEVER. She had me redo the meds...I am sure the patient was a little confused (I did give her a brief explanation)!

[quote=mjlrn97]Here's my embarrassing student-nurse story:

I couldn't find his penis. He was elderly and obviously had never been particularly large, but what he lacked in the endowment department he more than made up for in pubic hair, and to complicate matters his scrotum was so swollen he looked as though he were sitting on a soccer ball.

I looked at my instructor, Vicky, as if to say "Now what?", but she was standing at an angle where she couldn't see what I was dealing with, and she urged me on: "Grasp the shaft with your non-dominant hand, then expose the meatus........." Well, how the heck was I supposed to say out loud that I couldn't FIND it?!

Finally I managed to grab onto the poor man, and it took what seemed like forever to get the cath all the way in.......my fellow students were all but rolling on the floor, and Vicky was yelling "Come on, push it in, push, push, push!!" The worst part was when I kept losing my grip on the penis....with its meager dimensions covered in K-Y, it kept slithering out of my hand, and I must've had to start over six or seven times before I finally hit paydirt.

So did your instructor ever realize The root of the problem? (or lack thereof)

Yeah, but we were already halfway into things before she moved to a spot where she could see why I was having so much trouble, so all either of us could do was proceed in as professional a manner as possible.

I was working with a new grad who somehow spiked through the bottom part of the tubing and then through the side of the blood bag and wow what a mess that was. I was very calm and snickered. She was so embarrased but said she appreciated my patience.

Some of these stories are quite funny!


renerian

Now I'm confused...doesn't giving the med via NG tube achieve the same effect as giving it PO? The alternitive is the same; IV, IM, transdermal, or PR (a suppos). I can think of no reason to give the pill PO verses NG. Anyone out there that can help clear this up?!

Unless the NG is connected to sxn....



I don't know--I'm a nursing instructor and if I saw "give po" on someone with an NG tube, I'd assume we gave it via NG. That's how he gets the rest of his food/meds, right?

To give meds via NG you must crush them (or empty the capsule). Dilantin is available as a sustained release capsule. It is my understanding (though I have actually not yet passed meds) that you should NEVER crush a sustained release medication. Doing so can cause the whole drug to act at once instead of slowly over time. So, if it was a sustained release capsule, then that would be why it was ordered PO.

Right?

I was taking care of an elderly gentleman during my last semester of nursing school who had c-diff. He told me he had to go to the bathroom, and since I wanted to change the pad on his bed while he was on the toilet, I asked, "Could you hold on just a sec?" The linen cart was right outside of his room. I'll bet you know where this is going, huh?!? Well, as it happened, he couldn't wait a sec, and not only did I have to just change his chux pad, I had to change everything on the bed! Even more stupid of me, was, I was six months pregnant! I was terribly embarrassed and I felt awful because I wasn't thinking of his needs when I asked him to wait. I felt even worse because he was embarrassed because he lost control of his bowels!

It was a learning experience! So, needless to say, from that point on, whenever someone said, "I have to go now..." I took them NOW!!