No room for errors?

Many times have found lasix drips infusing 100 mg/hr instead of 10mg /hr. Then the nurse kept calling the doctor because the cardiac output kept dropping. DAH...go figure

Mistakes scare the crap out of me!! I made one yesterday and today I'm questioning my decision to stay in hospital nursing!! Patient wasn't harmed but could have been. (Fluid overload). My unit was extremely busy---five telemetry patients, call lights, pain meds., routine meds., assessments, phone calls from family members, the list goes on and on, but the fact of the matter is I MADE AN ERROR. That mistake won't happen again but can I continue to do this crazy job?? I love bedside nursing but sometimes the patient load is too much and there's nothing I can do about it except deal with it day to day (and complain to my manager).

I'm still relatively new--less than two years experience (part-time) so maybe it's normal to still be questioning whether I made the right decision to go into hospital nursing. I don't know. Ironically, this happened two days after I received an Excellence in Nursing Award from my peers. Sorta took the wind right out of my sails.

We had a couple of new girls on our ward and us old warhorses were telling war stories...topic turned to patient deaths and I said, "Oh yeah, I'm a nurse, I've killed lots of people." You never saw such horrified faces in your life, lol. I'm so mean.

I was thinking of things like, giving morphine to a patient for excruciating pain even though you know what it's gonna do. I don't think that's what they were thinking of though!

My med pass still scares me. I'm paranoid of making a med error.

Cardiac monitoring bothers me, when I see a rhythm I think "why are they on the monitor in the first place" "what can this rhythm potentially lead to?"

I worry sometimes I'm going to miss some telltale sign in my assignment. When a patient crashes I go over and over "what were the clues that I missed? Should I have done something different".

I've heard of some dangerous mistakes being made w/ drips running at the wrong rates. Wouldn't it just suck if you entered the "volume to be infused" number as the "rate- mL/hr" number? Oooops

We all know that can happen! I'm just now starting to not feel horribly guilty about my mistake and its been about a month. Once you do something wrong you become determined to never, ever do it again.

(Please refer to Med Error thread started by me in First Year of Nursing forum.)

Many years ago, a paramedics instructor once told me that in a crisis (either self-made or one that is thrust upon you due to circumstances) remember to take a breath. He meant to 'step back' when you feel overwhelmed, take a deep breath, and go to work.

That is actually taken from the book, "The House of G-d".

In the book, there were "The Rules of The House of G-d". One was:

In case of a code, always take your own pulse first.

As an onco nurse, my favorite was:

Don't take a temperature unless you want to treat a fever.