Sick to my stomach....

[Virgo_RN]

Yes, it's another "Sick to my stomach" thread.

I have to work tonight, and I'm already feeling ill. Last time I worked, it was a two night run of sheer chaos. The first night, I worked straight through with no breaks because we were understaffed. I didn't see an aide all night, and did total care on all of my patients.

The second night, one of my patients was found on the floor ten minutes into my lunch break, and I came back to the floor to deal with it and never got to finish my break. Plus it took two hours for the doc to return my pages, and then he gave me flak. I felt so ill about the patient apparently falling, and wanted to just go home then. I never want that to happen again.

Then I got an admit, but thankfully he was stable and only needed a few PO meds, and I did manage to get a dressing change done on another patient (something day shift had left for me to do), but I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the night, and I'm feeling sick to my stomach at the thought of going to work. I'm especially worried if the patient is still there and I have to face his family.

Everybody is telling me that I'm beating myself up. They say I can't be everywhere at once, and that sometimes no matter how hard we try to keep them safe, patients fall.

I still feel terribly.

[NotReady4PrimeTime, RN]

I have my own fall story that makes me cringe every time I think about it. But it doesn't involve one of my patients, it involves my son. He has a long and inglorious medical history, with many admissions and long stays, but this happened on a day when he was at the hospital for an out-patient visit. He was four at the time and had just been discharged a week or two earlier. We went up to the ward to visit the staff, who all loved him dearly. As he was leaving the desk area he took a corner a little faster than his balance liked and he fell, hitting his head solidly on the med room door. The thwack it made as the two connected was so loud everyone (the entire staff of the ward were there to see him at the time!) flinched. So of course, we had to file an incident report, he had to be examined and then observed for 2 hours before I could take him home. The unit clerk jokingly suggested that I put a helmet on him before our next visit. So embarrassing.