I am a student nurse working as a nursing assistant. Today I was a sitter for a patient that in report I told was stable, he had episodes of seizure activity three days ago but has since been asymptomatic. He has been walking to and from the bathroom with the help of his wife. When I talked to the charge nurse she told me that he does not really need a sitter but since i was there, she'd use me. I then talked to the nurse and asked if it was appropriate to sit inside the room or directly outside at a counter that is attached to the room, with the door open. Sitters i guess are supposed to sit inside the room, but when there is family at the bedside, it is customary to sit outside as long as the door is open and the patient is visible. the nurse said it was fine to sit outside cause the wife was there and he's stable. So i decided to sit outside cause the wife was there and the patient was still sleeping. He decides to go to the bathroom and the wife helps him after they tell me they don't need help. So i decide to give the patient his privacy as much as I can and am watching just outside the patient room doorway threshold into the bathroom, on his way up from the toilet he takes a step and starts going down. The wife assists him with his fall (he never actually hit the floor) and I immediately rush in as he is falling cause i see it happen. Its seizure like activity plus weakness. I call for help and everyone rushes him and its a big deal cause its a fall and all. Am I at fault cause I wasn't in the room? No one actually said it was my fault, but just told me to sit in the room from now on. I feel like it was my fault in that he fell and I wasn't next to him when it first happened, it happened so fast, but I did get from report that he was stable, both from the previous assistant, the night charge nurse and the day shift nurse. I even asked her where would be an appropriate place to sit, plus there was family in the room and the patient wanted privacy. It really bothered me because I wish someone would have just told me if I had done something wrong because then I could at least know what i could have changed. anyway, the patient later fell again on the way back from the toilet, this time I assisted the fall and I felt so incompetent this time cause the old snooty aid gave me that look like I was the worst assistant ever. the patient was later transferred to ICU because of the incidents, where he could be monitored on EKG. They're thinking it was due to heart blocks and weren't actually seizures. well in the ICU they're not allowed out of bed, but he did seizure twice more and five more times during the central line insertion. Then a convo between two docs goes like this:
"they're not seizures! where are you getting this verbage?!"
"the nurses said they were seizures"
"don't listen to the nurses, they don't know what they're talking about"
"the sitter said it was seizures" he then walks over to the charge and covering nurses
Then i may be paranoid but i get stares from them repeatedly. Okay, maybe they weren't seizures, but that is what I was told in report from the nurses! and thats what they said in report to the ICU nurses. and even during the central line insertion when they were happening, the docs and nurses in the room were yelling "he's seizing again! he's seizing!". After the first episode in the ICU doc unfamiliar with the patient walked in to help and asked what happened and being that I was the only person in the room with two spanish only speaking family members, I told him the patient seized again. was it inappropriate for me to have said "seized"? I was so uncomfortable and felt stupid all day. All I wanted so badly was for someone to tell me what I did wrong. I didn't have a supervisor to talk to cause I was floating all day and i was split between two units the floor and the ICU so there was continuinty in the people I could talk with about the situation. Can you tell me what it is I did wrong and advice about how to avoid it?
