TJ'sMOM

I work night shift 3 days a week. I drop my son off at school after work, work out for 1.5 hours, go play with my horses, go home and go to bed only on days that I'm not expected to be at work that night. On days where I'm working later in the evening, I sleep. Works for me!

I have two horses that I enjoy.

Our hospital floor was a pediatric floor many years ago. Although I have never experienced anything here, many patients see children or hear them. I used to work in an old TB hospital as a corrections nurse for youth. I never experienced anything there either, but many of the staff had. The head corrections officer was afraid to go into the basement! There seemed to be a "heavy" type feeling down there. They used to burn the bodies in incinerators down there. The building is now torn down. Thank you for starting this thread. I'm looking forward to hearing from -hopefully many- others!

How do you guys "bladder-train" your patients prior to removing the Foley catheter? Thank you!

Yes! I work in a hospital setting and this is 2016! We are still charting on paper and it SUCKS! So inefficient and I feel it interferes with time that can better be spent with the patient! 8-10 pages of ********. No kidding. Sorry for the profanity- thought this was Reddit. OK I'm done now.

I love watching my son play football and I love spending time riding and training my horses.

Yes! I like learning from the mistakes of others.

Nursing ghost stories!

You did nothing wrong! It seems the unit manager needs educated. And she seems like a bully.

I beat myself up EVERY DAY over a medication error that cost me a job that I loved. I was ordered to administer a bolus of normal saline because the patient was having hypotensive problems. I confused the line-A and line-B on the IV pump and the patient ended up getting an undetermined amount of potassium. (She had maintenance IV fluid of D5 and 1/2 Normal Saline with 20 Meq of KCL per 1000 ml bag which was supposed to be running at 40 ml/hour on the A-line.) I beat myself up EVERY SINGLE DAY over this error. I filled out an incident report, called the Doctor, took orders. The Doctor ordered to check the patient's postassium level in one hour and call him if abnormal. The potassium level was within normal limits. Her blood pressures had stabilized. The nurse that took over her care had confirmed to me the next day that she had been fine the entire night after I had gone home. I reported myself, because I was the one who caught the error, and the potassium level could have potentially even been fatal for the patient! I don't think I could have lived with myself if something adverse would have happened, or if the next nurse would have gotten in trouble for something that was my fault. To this day, I do not know HOW this happened! How I confused Line-A and Line-B of the IV pump!?! I consider myself to be much more consciencious than this. I beat myself up over this EVERY DAY. A few weeks later, I reported to the on-coming RN that I left the scheduled Ativan and Haldol in a hospice patient's room. The patient was a hospice patient who was in Isolation for Clostridium Difficile. I should have prepared the meds OUTSIDE of her room, then took the prepared meds in to administer them. Not use the built-in medication dropper to administer the meds accurately! DUH! I had placed the medications out of sight high on the cabinet to the side of the patient's bed, not at the bedside within her reach. I was told that a family member COULD HAVE stole those meds and used them and overdosed. A visiting child COULD HAVE climbed to the top of the shelf and overdosed. I agree, these things COULD HAVE happened. Thank God, they did not. I was brought into the office and told because of these "medication issues", they had to "let me go." They then offered me the option to resign. I beat myself up EVERY SINGLE DAY over this. EVERY SINGLE DAY. Of course, If the nurse hadn't "thrown me under the bus" and tattled on me, I'm sure management would have found another issue to get rid of me. Why couldn't the nurse have questioned ME about why I hid the medications in the room? I have learned from these mistakes, I admit I did the wrong thing. But I learn from managers/co-workers being upfront with me, telling me that I made a mistake and offer suggestions to improve my performance. I thought management was very unfair to "let me go."

Congratulations Sunny! Good luck with your career!

What about the obnoxious family members with a pen and paper who write down EVERYTHING the staff does; hoping for a mistake, so they are able to sue the hospital?

You sound like an honest, compassionate, conscientious nurse. Everybody makes mistakes.