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

Nurses General Nursing

Published

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.

Specializes in Gerontology.

I was on when a nurse left a Jamacan Patty unattended in the toaster oven - it caught fire, I had to use an extinguisher on it - she tried to 'carry' it to the sink - which was in another room - I told her to drop it on the floor and used the extinguisher. But not before we had pulled the fire alarm and had to pull all the pts sitting in the hall around the nsg station into rooms to get them away from the smoke/fumes. They took away all toaster ovens after that - she was not very popular! :) But no one was fired.

Specializes in ER.

I'm coming to this great thread late! I have a number of stories similar to others. I was in a trauma when the blood bag wasn't spiked completely and put in the pressure infuser...boom...blood everywhere.

I had a patient in ICU who was getting close to transfer and was bored. He was playing with the up/down button on the side rail (also had IVAC on IV pole). We heard a loud crash followed by laughter. He had raised the bed high enough to catch one of the crossed pieces of metal that hold up the ceiling tiles so when he lowered the bed, it ripped the metal and dropped ceiling tiles, dust and who knows what all over himself and the floor.

Last year I had a trauma patient that we were taking to ICU. He had a fx femur and was in full traction on a regular hospital bed, has a chest tube on one side of the bed, and blood hanging. He was sedated and his family had gone home (I was thankful for that).

The tech and I were trying to get the heavy bed onto the elevator (who thought it was a good idea to put carpet on the floor in a patient area??). Just as we started into the elevator one of the wheels on the bed turned and got stuck in the space between the elevator and the hallway. I mean stuck!! The tech had her phone and I told her to call security and tell them to send to big strong men to help. Of course they sent two of the tiniest people I have ever seen. We called back to the ER where they sent some effective helpers. Remember the patient is sedated. We pushed, lifted, pushed, rocked and finally got it out of the hole.

By the time we got to the trauma unit, we realized the traction setup was rocking and not at all steady. This is in the middle of the night of course. I called maintenence and told them to come STAT to the hallway and bring tools. The poor guy was under the bed trying to stabilize this traction setup while I was holding it still so it would not injure the patient. That is when we realized those things are only held in place by little plastic pins and of course one was broken. We had to call the ortho tech from home (he had just gotten to bed after setting us up in the ED :) ). He had to come back and set up a new bed and we finally were able to transfer the patient. It took us almost 2 hours from the time we left the ED!! My manager was a great sport and we all had a good laugh about it. But what an ordeal!! STUFF HAPPENS!!

The worse thing that ever happened to me was when I was a senior student nurse working as a student in a paid capacity, (we could do that back then). I had a young patient (we were both about 19) with spina bifida who was a paraplegic and was in the hospital for some long forgotten complaint. I wanted to take him for a ride around the hospital because he was bored. So off we went with me pushing the stretcher and both of us having a great time. He wanted to go outside, so I pushed him onto the ER EMS entrance. There was not much activity in the parking lot so I started taking him down the ramp into the parking lot. The next few seconds were terrifying! The rolling stretcher with the patient got away from me and rolled very quickly into the parking lot with me chasing it as fast as I could. The patient was laughing, I was near cardiac arrest when the stretcher finally came to a stop. No harm, no foul, but I can promise you I never did that again!!

And after 38 years of doing this crazy job, they keep letting me come back!

Specializes in LTC, Memory loss, PDN.

What a frivolous waste of water. There are thirsty people out there and you just spill it all over the floor. ....and you call yourself a nurse... :D:D:D

At least I had the decency to spill hundreds of $$$ worth out of a piggy bag, but YOU, YOU spilled water.

i love this thread! a good belly-laugh is great after all that turkey... and i hope all the whiners that got written up for making potentially serious med errors are not taking that "everybody makes mistakes" thing as applying to them!

i just thought of another one, back from the days of glass bottles-- i reached up to move a tpn bottle off the iv hook and the spike came out-- i reflexively tried to stick it back in and for my trouble got half a liter of cold sticky stuff down my arm, into my axilla, soaking my bra and everything else all the way to my knees in about 5 seconds. oh, geez, it makes me get goosebumps just thinking about it-- and that stuff stinks, too.

Yep....anything with MVI reeks. Baby vitamins on steroids :barf01:

:D

What a frivolous waste of water. There are thirsty people out there and you just spill it all over the floor. ....and you call yourself a nurse... :D:D:D

At least I had the decency to spill hundreds of $$$ worth out of a piggy bag, but YOU, YOU spilled water.

Good point- a ShopVac and a bit of boiling, and it would've been good for soup....:eek:

Specializes in Emergency/Cath Lab.
Good point- a ShopVac and a bit of boiling, and it would've been good for soup....:eek:

Why boil all that tastey pre-seasoning out of it?

Why boil all that tastey pre-seasoning out of it?

Well, that's a very good point. Some residue of c.diff, MRSA, VRE, TB, nec. fasciitis juices, some generic turd skids, a bit of pseudomonis urine..... would save on the aromatic veggies needed for a good soup :up:

Specializes in PACU.

Our facility recently switched from the individual cups of juice to larger cartons. I made the mistake of giving one a shake without ensuring that the lid was closed. I splashed juice all over myself, a chair, and the floor behind the nursing station. I got ribbed for the rest of the day by the folks who saw me. I felt bad for the poor dude who had to come and mop it up.

Specializes in PDN; Burn; Phone triage.

Mixing a powdered antibx with sterile water. I wasn't expecting the amount of force needed to keep the syringe in the previously unopened antibx bottle. Bottle pops off the syringe and partially reconstituted drug sprays all over myself, my preceptor, and the med room. But at least it wasn't methylene blue!

The art of starting a piggyback was just totally lost on me throughout capstone. No matter how many times I did it. Open roller clamps. The worst was when you spiked the bag too low and you'd get sprayed. Usually it was just me but I once managed to spray myself and the patient.

The coolest thing was something my friend actually did. I was helping her do something with a patient of hers. She was setting up the little bubbler to humidify the patient's oxygen. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what she did or didn't do but the bubbler shot like a rocket across the room and sprayed water everywhere.

Specializes in ER.

The coolest thing was something my friend actually did. I was helping her do something with a patient of hers. She was setting up the little bubbler to humidify the patient's oxygen. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what she did or didn't do but the bubbler shot like a rocket across the room and sprayed water everywhere.

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

Background: working adolescent psych/CD- weekend night Baylor plan....40 beds. One other nurse and usually one tech for mobile birth control and bed checks. The occasional acting out with the docs preferring a cocktail of Haldol 5mg AND Ativan 2mg IM. No customers in the tank that night.

AND, no tech this night.

Other nurse and I were hungry; usually there were snacks around (and the sup would go for a burger run- not sure where he was) , but it must have been close to restocking time, because pickings were slim. There was, however, a tray of ingredients for chocolate chip cookies on the counter- with 2 eggs.... :up: Eggs it is.

We got them in the microwave, and were waiting for them to cook, when all of a sudden there was a blast reminiscent of WW2 films. We both looked at each other like we were in serious physical danger as the microwave door blew open and egg shrapnel went EVERYWHERE. After a few stunned seconds, we lost it. There were blobs of egg and shell all over the report room. We couldn't look at each other without falling apart again, and finally she just headed off to the bathroom d/t some questionable bladder stability.

We did a quick run down the halls (one on either side of a central station) to be sure all kids were accounted for, not fornicating, and hadn't been sent into some sort of PTSD meltdown from the blast,....Kids were fine. We then got busy cleaning up the mess. Nobody ever told either of us to vent the shell....:D

+ Add a Comment