Asked to get a urine specimen from a foley, I mistakenly pulled the NS from the balloon port (luckily, discovered my error before foley slid out)
Hanging abx that have to be mixed with a bag of NS, I attached the vanco where the line goes and then didn't have a clue why I couldn't spike the other port (had to start all over)
Crushed all the pt meds (about 7 or 8) for administration thru the NG tube, only to discover the patient was hypotensive and mixed in there was a beta blocker (learned always crush BP meds separately, and always take BP before crushing!)
Newbie error: Inserted NG tube and tried futilely (is that a word?) to verify placement, until pt yawned and several coils of the tube fell out of their mouth (this happened so many times I look in pt mouth before going any further)
Placed EKG printout in chart of wrong pt -cardiologist was paged asking where he had taken the printout?
Left tourniquet on pt arm after blood draw for 30 minutes ( I really felt awful about this one! - now the first thing I do is make sure I have the tourniquet in my hand when I leave the room)
While changing abx being run as a secondary, set empty bag (still attached to primary fluid bag) on bed without closing clamp and was starled to see my empty bag of abx was now amazingly fulll again!
Tried to prime an IV line for a blood product administration, but spiked the wrong line - one without the blood filter. Then I stupidly tried to remove the administration set from the bag to spike with the proper line. Of course, I got NS all over everything and had to start all over - which was fortunate for me, because otherwise I would have totally broken sterility by spiking a line twice! (What was I thinking?)
I could go on and on .... but I am beginning to sound like a danger to myself and others - In all of these cases I was able to start from scratch without harming the pt, with the exception of the tourniquet, which could have been disastrous but fortunately was only painful.
