I am venting my pet peeves. I had one of each of these yesterday, 1 patient w/ 3 of these. Share with me yours.
I hate:
1. Giving enemas - I have never not caused a huge mess even before I get the solution INTO the patient.
2. Taking accuchecks - The accucheck needs a calibration or quality check, or has the wrong code card for the strips, or I don't stick the patient hard enough so there's not enough blood and then have to go run for another finger stick thingie because the second one I grabbed is faulty
3. Sitz bath - see #1
4. Simply having a patient in isolation - putting on and taking off the PPE can suck your time, and if the patient has the temp in their room up I get all hot and sweaty within 5 minutes
5. Putting in a foley - this is never as easy as it should be. Either the A&O patient is unhelpful "Please keep your knees up and apart Ms X" or the anatomy is unhelpful.
Having to change tubing, when the nurse before me incorrectly programs the VTBI and the tubing before the cassette & half the cassette goes dry. Some of the nurses I work with have a trick where, when you spike a new bag, you can back prime & fix the problem. But I've never gotten it to work. And the pt almost always has a PCA, when I have to do this.
I hate doing vitals... it always takes longer than you think, and you have to waste time tracking people down because half of them are not in their room, and the equipment acts up constantly.
Passing out snacks. We have a morning run and an afternoon run. The morning run sucks because I still have care and rounds to do and i have to drop everything to try and coax 32 people into eating or drinking something they don't want. They just had a huge breakfast, and the nurse gives them meds with water or applesauce, most of them also get calorie drinks or juice with miralax in it. Then about 20 minutes later we are expected to give them pudding and Ensure! All this within an hour! This is an advanced dementia unit so people are constantly losing weight and they just keep piling on more calorie drinks.
The afternoon run sucks too because everyone is in bed sleeping and again, even though they didn't JUST have a meal, they still don't want the snacks! And it's a struggle with the residents who stay up too because you have to race Recreation to give them the drinks before they go to activities.
I hate feeding patients who chew each mouthful 50 times and take forever to eat one bowl of food. I HATE handing out meal trays. It takes ages.
I also dislike doing ECGs. They always seem to take forever, the tabs won't stick, the patient moves, they need shaving, the machine is out of paper.... etc!
Tubing changes! In ICU with a SGC, all the pressure tubing, 5 gtts, having to change the art-line dressing, such a task. And it never fails pharmacy is slow to get one of the gtts up to you and you have to wait until last thing in the morning and rush to finish...
I hate doing controls on my accu check meter. I don't know why. I just don't like to do it.
Ha ha! I just picked up a noc shift tonight and I was just thinking "I'm going to have to do that darned control check" Of all the things we do it's probably the easiest, but I just hate doing it.
canesdukegirl, BSN, RN
1 Article; 2,543 Posts
I hate the dreaded words INVENTORY DAY!!!! Gross.