Nursing School Bloopers

cardsRN · May 31, 2007

it was our first clinical exposure, and i was assigned to a patient who needed her daily suppository. by the time i was about to give the meds, my clinical instructor went in to make sure that i would be doing the right thing. i was so nervous because it was my first time, and i ended up telling the patient this:
"Good morning mam, my name is jay and i'm about to insert my suppository inside your butt."

OMG you win! :rotfl:

to go with the IV bath stories. we had a ff chf pt on home dopamine so when she would come in you would have to switch her to hospital system and she was grouchy and bossy and i was a new grad. so i had already disconnected her meds and hooked up ours in her PICC, then the IV pump fell off the pole unspiking the bag. dopa all over me, the pt, the bed... me yelling for help knowing her BP would be in the 70's in a minute. and her just sitting there rolling her eyes at me. i wanted to go through the floor.

fultzymom · May 31, 2007

Anyone have any funny nursing school stories from their past?
I had to change an IV bag and went in with my instructor to do so. My instructor always made me nervous but I was determined to remain confident and do the task....it wasnt difficult. She proceeded to ask me what was in the bag and I told her normal saline. She told me "ok, go ahead" and stood back to watch. I proceeded to pull out the line to put it into the new bag, but didn't take it off the IV pole before doing so. I received a saline bath with the remaining fluid that was in the bag. My instructor ran to get a towel and we cleaned up the wet floor. She then asked me to step outside the room. I thought I was going to hear it. What I heard was her laughing and telling me that I had to laugh sometimes and "everyohne has a saline bath once and then it never happens again." I still don't believe her but its funny looking back now.

I did that too! But it went on the instructor somehow!! Talk about embarrassing!! :uhoh3:

squeakykitty · Jun 20, 2007

I had a classmate set up to take a pts. BP. She got the dynamap out, put it around the pts. arm, then put her stethescope on the brachial artery. It took her a few seconds to figure out why the nurse was looking at her funny.

cherokeesummer · Jun 22, 2007

Here's my embarrassing student-nurse story:
It was the first term of second year, and I was about to do my first catheterization, with my instructor and five or six other students in the room. The patient, thank God, was a fairly fresh post-op who was still pretty knocked-out from the anesthetic, so he didn't really care about all of us being in there, but after I got all my supplies, washed my hands, and gloved up I discovered something I hadn't counted on: I couldn't find his member. :uhoh21: He was elderly and obviously had never been particularly large, but what he lacked in the endowment department he more than made up for in pubic hair, and to complicate matters his scrotum was so swollen he looked as though he were sitting on a soccer ball.
I looked at my instructor, Vicky, as if to say "Now what?", but she was standing at an angle where she couldn't see what I was dealing with, and she urged me on: "Grasp the shaft with your non-dominant hand, then expose the meatus........." Well, how the heck was I supposed to say out loud that I couldn't FIND it?! Luckily, I happened to glance back at the patient, who mumbled something along the lines of "Here" and showed me where it was located :imbar In the meantime the other students were literally crimson with suppressed laughter, and I still had to insert the darn Foley.......The instructor was getting a little upset with me because I didn't seem to be, uh, grasping the situation, and her voice got louder as she demonstrated the proper way to hold the member while inserting the catheter with the dominant hand. Then she moved around to manually assist me, saw why I was having so much trouble......and made me continue anyway.
Finally I managed to grab onto the poor man, and it took what seemed like forever to get the cath all the way in.......my fellow students were all but rolling on the floor, and Vicky was yelling "Come on, push it in, push, push, push!!" The worst part was when I kept losing my grip on the member....with its meager dimensions covered in K-Y, it kept slithering out of my hand, and I must've had to start over six or seven times before I finally hit paydirt. By this time the sweat was literally pouring off of me, I was out of breath, and my classmates were barrelling out the door into the hallway, where I could hear them howling with laughter as Vicky told me, "That's probably the worst catheterization I've ever seen---but you did it!"
It was also probably the hardest one I ever did; after that, catheterizing other patients was a snap, and I wound up being the first in my class to be allowed to perform this task independently. But until the day we graduated, I was teased unmercifully about that day and hailed with the Catheter Queen Salute, which was a hand signal reminiscent of the way I'd kept flailing away in my futile efforts to hold onto that poor patient's manhood.
:uhoh21:

Not only was that laugh a greatly needed one as I am sick as a dog tonight but you put it so eloquently it was as if reading an english novel or something LOL never heard it described so well...are you a writer by profession too? Seriously, that is a GREAT funny one but written very well! LOL!

IlliniBabyRN · Jun 22, 2007

This happened to a good friend of mine in our nursing class but I laugh every time I picture her doing it. At this point in our clinicals we were able to do an injection by ourselves if our instructor had seen us do it enough times and felt comfortable with us performing the task. Well my friend went into her patient's room to give a Lovenox inj. After trying several times to inject the med. she came out into the hallway where her instructor was standing talking to another student. My friend had a wide-eyed look on her face and yelled "THIS NEEDLE IS DEFFECTIVE!!!" ...the instructor looked at her and said "well, try taking the cap off" hahahaha

ICU_JOSIE, MSN, RN · Jun 22, 2007

To give meds via NG you must crush them (or empty the capsule). Dilantin is available as a sustained release capsule. It is my understanding (though I have actually not yet passed meds) that you should NEVER crush a sustained release medication. Doing so can cause the whole drug to act at once instead of slowly over time. So, if it was a sustained release capsule, then that would be why it was ordered PO.
Right? :chair:

Yep, I agree on that one. :lol2:

traumaliz · Jun 23, 2007

My first day in clinical, I walked in and introduced my self to my patient, proceeded to kick over a completely FULL metal urinal on the floor. I ran down the hall and asked my instructor where the mops were kept--when she asked why, I said don't ask questions!

The same day--5 of our students were taken in to watch a paracentesis being done. One threw up, one passed out on the spot, and a third knocked herself out cold when she ran into the door, trying to get out of the room. There were only17 of us total, so I'd say we made quite an impression.

Liz

grace90, LPN, LVN · Jun 25, 2007

As a student I was once assigned to a retired nursing instructor who was known to be a real pistol. I was stressing bigtime and when she asked to be put on the bedpan, a fracture pan, I put it under her backwards. Funny now, not then. :uhoh3: :lol2: :trout:

MrsMommaRN · Jun 26, 2007

my last seven weeks of nursing school i was on the postpartum/nursery floor. i had worked up to a full patient load and had a mom ring her light. i was running my butt off helping docs with circumsicsions, doing patient teachings etc. i answered her light. she asked if she could take her shower today. my reply "did you have a circumsicsion today?":imbar i meant c-section. we all had a laugh. she had to think about it for a second though.

RedWeasel, RN · Sep 23, 2007

My classmate was emptying her first foley bag, forgot to clamp it and got urine ALL over her white scrub pants. Even worse, it was the cherry red bloody sort of urine.
On my nursing home rotation, I was helping an elderly woman tuck her shirt in. We got done and she said "can you get my girls out of my pants please?" I, of course, thought she had gone crazy. Nope. I had tucked her BREASTS into her elastic waisted pants... Whoops.

on my first day as nsg student, i and another student who gave a pt a bath did this. It took everything in me not to laugh cuz the other student was a male and just as shocked to see how they -the girls-can 'age'... :nono:

RedWeasel, RN · Sep 23, 2007

This happened to a good friend of mine in our nursing class but I laugh every time I picture her doing it. At this point in our clinicals we were able to do an injection by ourselves if our instructor had seen us do it enough times and felt comfortable with us performing the task. Well my friend went into her patient's room to give a Lovenox inj. After trying several times to inject the med. she came out into the hallway where her instructor was standing talking to another student. My friend had a wide-eyed look on her face and yelled "THIS NEEDLE IS DEFFECTIVE!!!" ...the instructor looked at her and said "well, try taking the cap off" hahahaha

I had a pt who on the previous shift had been administered monistat per lady parts-i guess they didn't remove the cap and a Dr had to come in to remove it.

BBsAngel · Sep 26, 2007

When I was a new nursing student another student ,who we will call Mary and myself with the instructor were cleaning a pt up who had had a BM. We would clean the pt but every time we turned them over the pt would have another BM. After about the third time the instructor said, "OK Mary go get a stopper." Mary said, "Stopper OK" and hurries out of the room. The instructor and I were laughing so hard we don't know when she figured out that we didn't really want a stopper.