What's the goofiest mistake you've made on the job? No, I don't mean the med errors or the medical mistakes you learned from. Those are important and often terrible experiences, of course, but this isn't about danger to patients or trauma.
I just really want to talk about the silly things we ALL do and can have the good grace to laugh about. It seems I find so many great stories in the nursing community because we often are under such stress, that we're so focused on those important details and avoiding the critical mistakes...so our brain tends to reserve less power on the things that don't matter as much.
Here's my confession. (And if any of my coworkers are on this forum, I'm outing myself gloriously, because we ALL had a good laugh over it...) My adolescent psych unit is in a small, private hospital, so though EMR has been promised to us, it's not quite here yet. A frustration of mine, to be sure...but that's another story. The kiddos were being super impulsive and just SO MUCH limit-testing going on, and I'm trying to get meds passed and RN assessments done and also manage patients and such. My awesome techs are working their butts off. The usual. One of my team asks if I can bring him "four soaps." That's a bit excessive, I think, but I also know, hey, sometimes teenagers want A LOT of body wash and our trial size containers aren't that big. Or maybe he's distributing them for hygiene time or something.
THIS IS WHERE I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE QUESTIONED SOMETHING.
Cheerfully, I grab four of the small body wash vials, and bring them to him, and he's like..."what?" Because he meant four SOAPs, as in SOAP notes, which we do on each patient q shift...and he was asking me to bring him the charts...
I spiked my bag, didnt "off" the roller and spilled some down the infusion pump. Family complained. A small amount is a huge mess. I am super careful now.
Had a comfort care patient with a heartbeat of like 5 per minute with agonal breathing. Super close to dead. I call the doc and tell him he is dead, doc checks on patient and he asks, "what is the definition of dead?" He died 2 hours later = no heartbeat.
I had a post CABG patient who was a guy in his 70's and about 6 ft 6 inches. He hadn't pooped since his surgery, and was getting mighty uncomfortable 1 1/2 weeks out. He got more doses of MOM, Mg+ citrate, and dulcolax tabs than you could shake a stick at … but he just couldn't go. And he started getting pretty agitated, getting up to the bedside commode but not, um … performing, multiple times and snorting like a bull.
While I was at lunch a helpful co-worker decided to give the guy a glycerine suppository …
I came back just in time for him to yell with urgency, "Now! I gotta go right NOW!".
The guy is ginormous to my 5 ft 2 inch 100 lb frame, so I grab some help hoisting this impatient guy up to the commode ...
So Let me stop here and tell you how the VA I worked at did things: the commodes were not buckets you had to wash out, which in most cases was great. They were empty bottoms in which a heavy duty compressed particle board insert was placed instead. When the patient was done doing business, you placed it into a device that was combination water filled hopper and garbage disposal - you clamped the lever and the whole thing vanishes, no chance of back spray in your face while washing out a nasty stool filled bucket. Only this time it backfired …
The patient was so FOS that the weight of it caused the insert to sag … with resigned inevitability we all watched it as it dropped out the bottom, scattering the whole mess containing every conceivable form of stool imaginable - from hard pellets to liquid charnel house effluivia. There was a "PLOP" and a concentric circle of hell spread out almost 8 feet as we all jumped backwards out of the line of fire.
The guy felt better, even if his feet and legs were covered in stool. And, I had another house keeping guy out for my blood. As he keeled on the floor using towels to gather it all up I'm certain he was planning my death in cold blood.
Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
This isn't telling on ME, but it happened early in my career and when I saw it, my mouth dropped open.
Large, large, very well-known Urban Hospital...the meds were on an open cart. Yes...open cart. There were 4 to 5 tiers of shelves on the top of the cart, with full-size bottles of 100-500 pills on them. Nobody had their own meds, you just poured from the open stock bottles. So easily available were all the meds that are now counted, just about anyone could pick up a bottle and take a few when the cart was sitting unattended at the nurses station or in the hallway outside a room. The only meds actually counted were the injectable narcs, and they were kept in a locked drawer in a locked med room.
I was walking down the hall behind a Tech of the unit-specialty (not a nurses aide) and from his lab jacket pocket, which unfortunately had a hole in it of which he was unaware, he trailed a line of about a dozen Percodan behind him.
I was raised in a small town and quite a naive 21 year old, so it never occurred to me that people would actually blatantly help themselves to drugs. I was puzzled, because 'he was such a nice guy'.
This isn't telling on ME, but it happened early in my career and when I saw it, my mouth dropped open.
Large, large, very well-known Urban Hospital...the meds were on an open cart. Yes...open cart. There were 4 to 5 tiers of shelves on the top of the cart, with full-size bottles of 100-500 pills on them. Nobody had their own meds, you just poured from the open stock bottles. So easily available were all the meds that are now counted, just about anyone could pick up a bottle and take a few when the cart was sitting unattended at the nurses station or in the hallway outside a room. The only meds actually counted were the injectable narcs, and they were kept in a locked drawer in a locked med room.
I was walking down the hall behind a Tech of the unit-specialty (not a nurses aide) and from his lab jacket pocket, which unfortunately had a hole in it of which he was unaware, he trailed a line of about a dozen Percodan behind him.
I was raised in a small town and quite a naive 21 year old, so it never occurred to me that people would actually blatantly help themselves to drugs. I was puzzled, because 'he was such a nice guy'.
D'oh!
Back in the late 1980's I worked as a dental assistant in a periodontal office. Back then vicodin had just come out, so the drug rep gave the dentist about 200 samples which we kept in one of those cardboard boxes you put together for files that also has a cardboard lid (I know, classy). We used to take it out of town for surgery in rural areas and the dentist handed them out to his post-open gratis patients that couldn't afford to pay for dental surgery, or pay for a Rx for pain meds.
The office manager was in a clandestine carnal relationship with the dental hygienist, so when they broke up he told me in confidence that one day he was staying over at her house and he opened a drawer in her nightstand - there sat all 200 sample tabs of vicodin! None of us noticed they had vanished!
Specializes in Crit Care; EOL; Pain/Symptom; Gero.
Some 35 years ago I worked Med-Surg in a Catholic hospital. Every year on Palm Sunday, the priest chaplain and several of the administrative nuns would do a Palm Procession through all the units of the hospital. The expectation was that one staff member from each unit would join the procession as it passed through.
My co-worker and I didn't want to be part of the procession, so when we heard the approaching hymn-singing and the tower door open onto our floor, we took off for the solarium (remember those?) and attempted to hide behind floor-length draperies on either side of the giant window.
In retrospect, we realized that the processional participants surely must have noticed our white NurseMate "Clinics" sticking out from behind the curtain, but they just passed on by.
2 things for me. The first time I inserted an NG tube the tip got caught under the patient's upper dentures and they came flying out of her mouth, landed on the floor and shattered. My reaction...hysterical laughter. Real professional I know. The second is when I wrote a cover letter to apply to a job in the ED, instead of using Sylvia, the ED manager's name I used Saliva. That explains why I never got a call.
Specializes in Crit Care; EOL; Pain/Symptom; Gero.
When I was in the student nurse float pool I had a little old woman with diarrhea ring her call light … I ambulated her to the toilet to explode in horrible ways, and with the walker ambulated her back to bed. All tucked in, cozy and comfory - until that look of horror passed over her face! "Gotta go again!" … Up we go back to the bathroom, but we didn't make it. About 2 feet from the door she explodes - it was like a brown keg of dynamite. My shoes, the walls, her legs, the floor in a 4 foot circle, and the tip of my long ponytail. We washed her down (while I try not to ralph and heave). I got her back to bed but the housekeeping guy gave me the stinkeye like he wanted to kill me as he kneeled cleaning up the circle of yuck on the floor. I wanted to apologize, but I didn't cause the explosion. He never forgave me, even after I graduated, but I really was not to blame! Poor guy!
A few years ago, I was giving instruction on how to use an Epi Pen. My leg was sore from demonstrations, so I turned and hit the tip of the Pen on the table beside me. Unknowingly, I had picked up an actual Pen. It slipped off the edge and into my thumb. Half of the Epi was injected before I could remove the Pen....at the end of the day, my thumb was still numb so I went to the ER.....
First, they wanted to test me for HIV, AIDS, etc....and I reminded them it was a CLEAN needle.
After an hour or so, I was being given discharge instructions, including to return if my thumb BECAME numb. I quickly reminded my nurse that the reason I was there was because my thumb was already numb..... my teacher aides have reminded me of this every year it was time to go over training.
Before nursing, I was a paramedic. We received a call for a boating accident. The patient had fallen overboard into the propeller. She resembled slices of beef steak lying on the seat....hard to believe that was the patient. A few months later, I was working at a scout camp. The steaks were supposed to be medium to well, but the blood still oozing gave me a flashback to the boating incident....I had to leave the dining area....without eating.
Had a cheap stethoscope around my neck that had actually formed a u shape, while removing the stethoscope the end hit my patient's top lip causing it to bleed. I had to report not only was the patient there due to being sick, but now had a busted lip that she needed to look at. The patient and physician both had a good laugh at my expense. Whew! I was glad I did not get into trouble.
Before I was an RN...I was fresh faced out of high school and got my first job as a caregiver at an Alzheimer's facility working NOCS. The sweet lady training me instructed me to go get the tympanic thermometer from the nurse's station to make gathering VS quicker. I had never used one and asked the RN how to use it. He looked at me for a second but then told me how. I went on my way gathering VS. I couldn't figure out how it was so much quicker and efficient than using the disposable ones for an axillary- it seemed to disturb that patients. I was in my last room, with my pt snorting (yes snorting, not snoring) up a storm, when the lady who was training me walked in. She said "Stop! What are you doing??" I said "I'm thought you wanted me to get vitals?" She said "It goes in their ear, not their nose!"
New Rn , transporting patient will full liter of saline hanging with the bed pole too high through the doorway , bag popped gave the patient and myself a bath. Oops! Couldn't help but laugh, the elderly lady looked up at me and said ' I think the bags leaking honey' . Well u only make that mistake once
WanderingSagehen
114 Posts
I spiked my bag, didnt "off" the roller and spilled some down the infusion pump. Family complained. A small amount is a huge mess. I am super careful now.