Daisie4100

I am super stressed out. I am a triage nurse at a small clinic. I was the part time evening nurse and there was a full time day nurse. I have only worked there for less than 3 months. Yesterday, they fired the daytime triage nurse and asked me if I would take her position. I accepted this morning and then my day went down the tubes. I had multiple calls about possible stroke, heart attack, and fall injuries. Then I had 5 patients come in for shots. All of this between 8 and 10 am. One of the patients was in for an allergy shot. These shots come with specific instructions from the allergy clinic on dosing. When reading the dosing, I made an error and instead of .10 mL I gave 1.0 mL. I realized my mistake right after. I monitored the patient for 30 minutes, spoke with my manager, called the allergy clinic and spoke with the nurse there. The nurse at the allergy clinic said to have the patient take an antihistamine and monitor for allergic reaction. My manager said to document everything thoroughly and if the patient was fine send him home with instructions. I had to explain to the patient my mistake and gave him the instructions of what to watch for and what to do if there was a reaction. The patient was understandably upset but remained calm. After 30 minutes, there was only a 10-12mm wheal in the area where the shot was administered. The patient felt fine so he went on his way. I did what I could do in the situation and documented everything. I owned up to my mistake right away. I still feel like I could puke at any second. I feel terrible. This is my first med error and I am thankful that it wasn't tragic. But I just feel like an idiot. Am I being too hard on myself?

I am a second year as well. The other day a nurse was watching a fellow student of min remove a PICC and she almost blacked out. This is something she does frequently but she said she had never really thought about doing it while she was doing it. She has been a nurse for 15 years. I figure if it can happen to her it can happen to anyone. A couple of weeks ago I was watching an ECT treatment which was done in a tiny closet of a room and I almost passed out because I was feeling so claustrophobic. Luckily I made it out of the room and sat outside the door for a few minutes and was fine. The nurse that said that to you was out of line. That's what they mean when they say nurses eat their young. Don't be too hard on yourself. Just remember this experience when you are working with students after you become a nurse!

I am currently in my first semester of ADN program and I completely understand your feelings of being overwhelmed. The only advice I have is to go on to youtube and spend an hour watching funny cats. I know it sounds stupid but laughing at silly stuff really helps me release tension. Good luck!

Thank you everyone! I have talked to my instructor and there is no formal accusation of plagiarism being made by she is upholding the zero. She also will not let us do anything to make up the points. I am extremely upset but have decided to move on. One of our last things to turn in is another group paper and this experience has made me not want to have any part in it. Not sure how I'm going to handle this group.

In my Nursing Fundamentals class we had to do a group presentation and write a paper about how the group worked together to achieve our teaching goals. We turned the paper in on Monday. Today we all got an email that we needed to meet with our instructor. We raced in there, where she handed us the program plagiarism policy. She proceeded to tell us that there was a blatant case of plagiarism in our paper. She understands that only one of us wrote that part of the paper but since we all agreed that the paper was good enough to hand in, that we were all getting a zero for the paper. She said we were lucky that we weren't kicked out. She said that she had discussed it with all of the staff and the dean and they decided that a zero was the least punishment for the group. Now the girl who did it was really upset because she had cited the book and was providing the rationale that was required. It turns out however that the person who did our references neglected to include this cite. She instead made up her own cite for this reference and screwed it up by only citing the last page of the book. She had not been a very good team player the whole presentation, and now this. The funny thing is, we all emailed her our references in APA format. All she had to do is put them all on one page. That's it. And she couldn't even do that right. Does anyone know if there is anyway to fight this without making things worse?

I don't care what he says....I'm not sniffing his butt.