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...
Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.
Some of these are hard to top. I've sprayed myself in the face with any variety of nasty fluid, had a toddler pee out the side of his diaper onto my pants while he slept on my lap, blown apart the silicone section of tubing on more than one feeding tube setup by forgetting to take the cap off the patient end, pulled the spike out of a bag of IV fluid while it was still in the pressure bag... the list of those kinds of things is long. But I think having to fill out TWO staff injury forms for chair-related head injuries in the same month might be my wow-you're-special-aren't-you moments. The first one was just before we got new task chairs on the small 8-bed open unit where I was working at the time. It was closing in on 5 am, it was my third night and all I wanted was to sit for a minute. There was this one chair that had a broken back, where if you leaned back a little against it the chair would recline dramatically. It also had no wheel locks on it. Long story short, I went to sit on it, misjudged the distance to the seat, grabbed for the back and as I sat, the chair reclined AND rolled away from me. My fanny hit the floor and I hit my head on the edge of the desk, but not so hard that it even really hurt. But it was witnessed by EVERYBODY on the shift with me. I duly filed a staff injury form for OH&S. A couple of weeks later we had gotten new chairs, really lovely ones that had multiple adjustments for both comfort and efficiency. I was on days and had been shown what each of the various knobs and handles did. Wanting to show off my knowledge, I proceeded to demonstrate how to adjust the angle of the seat back... while standing to the side of the chair leaning across the seat. The seat back adjusted all right. It sprang forward, smacked me in the side of the head and knocked me on my butt. In front of our attending and the whole unit. I suffered through a neuro exam in the middle of the unit - I was completely fine - and when the doc suggested I should go home, I told her that if I wasn't safe to stay at work I DEFINITELY wasn't driving home. But I dutifully filled out another staff injury form. It's a wonder I didn't get a visit from our OH&S coordinator. Some might say it explains a few things though.
Priming the tubing for an antibiotic but forgetting to reconstitute it first. Dropping narcs on my first day on orientation and spending five minutes on the floor of the patient's room trying to find it so I have something to waste
Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
I've told this one before on another thread, and it has to do with my brain and mouth not necessarily being in sync.
I was the 3-11 med nurse on the step-down unit/med-surg overflow in a small suburban hospital. Usually the med nurse got a light assignment for PM routine, and that night I did: a four bed 'ward' room, with 3 strapping young men with football game injuries, and Oscar who was 88 years old and needed help getting out of his chair and into bed.
I pulled the curtain around Oscar's bed. He said "I have to pee." I handed him the urinal and got busy straightening up the bed-clothes, when I felt something warm and wet running down my left leg. I turned and looked at Oscar, who was holding the urinal alright...about 2 feet from his member, which continue to spew urine onto my leg. I pushed his hand holding the urinal over toward his lap and said:
"Oscar! Oscar! You're 88 years old and you don't know how to use it yet? Put it in! Put it in!"
After about 5 seconds of shocked silence, those young men began to howl with laughter, as did I. I laughed until tears ran down my face and my cheeks hurt.
For the next few days until their discharge, at least one and sometimes all three guys would see me walk by their room and someone HAD to say, in a high-pitched voice, "Put it in! Put it in!"
Y'know I was always disappointed that it was not the kind of 'All In A Day's Work' anecdote I could send to the Reader's Digest!
I went to start an IV on a patient who was a difficult start due to the fact she was a former IVDA. She was nice who wanted me to keep trying. On my final try, at her insistance, I went to tighten the tourniquet and it broke. I ended up punching her in the face. I asked her if she was ok, and I was fine with not continuing to try for the IV. She insisted I try again. I kept apologizing for hitting her. Her glasses were OK. I told her nurse what happened. I am sure he heard the laughter from the patient who was also an employee who was also in bed 1.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
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
Oh no. Some of us can make that mistake a few times!
I have a doozy. As a student I had ambulated a pt to the toilet and was waiting outside to respect patient privacy, however I had the door cracked so I could hear if anything happened. Not long after, the code blue goes off. And I'm thinking to myself "oh dear I hope everything's alright". Before I know it, everyone is streaming into my bed space where I'm standing and I'm thinking "what the...... I just have a patient on the toilet". Somehow, the patient had set of the code blue alarm. And I was the butt of a few jokes for a few days. But it's pretty funny later down the track
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
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
This story reminds me of the time I saw my first electric bed. I went to school in the early 70s, and the hospital in which I did my Med/Surg clinical had just gotten electric beds. We students were used to the older hand crank beds, which really did tax your dignity in the dresses we had to wear, bending down to crank the bed. The electric beds were so exciting. You press a button and the head goes up, and it goes down. The whole bed goes up, and it goes up and it goes up . . . and the IV pole at the head of the bed hits the ceiling light and goes right through the flourescent bulb and suddenly there is a lot of sparking and some screaming and glass everywhere. You'd have thought I would have learned my lesson right there, wouldn't you? Nope. I got on an elevator with a patient on the way from the cath lab to the OR, STAT. I was actually riding ON the bed, on my knees doing intermittent CPR. As we rolled onto the elevator, I remembered the IV pole, and before I could say anything to anyone, the pole smacked into the wall above the elevator and took out one of those pretty "up" arrows that were right next to the "down" arrow that was taken out when we backed the bed off the elevator just a bit and then jammed it forward (as if that would take care of the problem.) This time it was a plastic shower, not a glass shower, and the least of the patient's worries.
1. I was working a night shift and I was doing my final rounds at 5am. My patient had a Foley and it wasn't draining. I could not figure out why it wasn't draining so I asked another nurse to come in and take a look at it. I asked her if I should irrigate it to see if it's draining properly. Well the Foley bag was hanging off of the railing of the bed which was higher than the patient's bladder so obviously it wasn't draining. The other nurse just lowered the Foley bag and it started draining. It was such a simple solution but I was clearly overthinking.
2. I once asked a patient when her last bowel movement was. She just looked at me and pointed to her colostomy. I felt so dumb. I was working with this same patient and I was getting her medication ready. When i was at the bedside I was opening her medication packets and talking to the family at the same time. I wasn't paying attention and I put the pills in her cup of water instead of the med cup. Once I realized what I did I apologized to the family and patient and went to get her more medication. We were able to laugh about it but I remember thinking they probably thought I was the most incompetent nurse.
3. I went to prime a feeding tube and forgot to take the cap off the end. The pressure built up and the cap popped off and hit the patient in the face.
4. I had four patients in a ward room and all of them were confused and trying to climb out of bed on their own. The one patient would purposely make his bed alarm go off to agitate the other patient in the room. He found this hilarious. My other patient came back from dialysis and as I was dealing with these other confused patients this patient got really agitated and pulled out his PICC line, Foley and even managed to disconnect his rectal tube from the collection bag. Every time the patient coughed poop flew across the room. As I was trying to get him settled and assess the damage he ripped the curtain down. The room had poop, blood and urine everywhere and the patient was all tangled up in his bed sheets and curtain with his body fluids all over the bed. The room looked like a crime scene.
5. I had a patient who was postop and hadn't had a bowel movement in a while. The shift before me gave her a suppository so when I first entered the room the patient wanted to get up and go to the bathroom. I was working with the other patient in the room when I heard the patient in the bathroom talking to her daughter saying "Do you think we should tell the nurse?" They were whispering and I got a bad feeling. When they came out of the bathroom they informed me that she had diarrhea. I told her it was not big deal, we would get her back to bed and clean her backside. I went into the bathroom to make sure the patient had flushed and there was diarrhea everywhere, the walls, all down the toilet and the floor. At my hospital it's the nurses responsibility to clean up this mess, housekeeping comes after to disinfect. Well the bathrooms are very small and as I was cleaning, I was bumping into the walls and sliding all over the floor. I managed to get poop all over my scrubs. Not a good start to a shift.
He worked at a car dealership years before, and once in a while the owner would select one of the workers to get to drive a brand new, fully loaded car up to Phoenix to a sister dealership approximately 200 miles away.
One day the owner came out with straws for everyone to select and a mournful look on his face. The guy who was telling me the story said lucky him - he selected the short straw! Yay!
Not!
He said the owner looked apologetic while this guy was high-fiving everyone, getting his back congratulatory slapped, and in general beaming bon homey and good will at his good luck. Then the owner shook his head, and said, "No … I'm so, so sorry …".
He brought him to the men's room and pushed open the door: apparently someone had GI distress while car shopping. It was a tiny space, really just a toilet and sink pushed into an area smaller than a broom closet. Apparently whoever went in there was in a hurry and had diarrhea, but didn't make it. It appeared whoever had visited there last had only enough time to pull down his drawers, but couldn't sit fast enough - he sprayed the back wall, the toilet, and nearly the whole bathroom in the green apple splatters.
You see he didn't win driving a tricked out car to Phoenix - he had to clean up that horrible men's room mess.
He said he wanted to quit - apparently the only reasonable solution he could think of was to light the bathroom on fire, and burn it to the ground. Oddly, the owner didn't agree with that idea.
It took him hours to clean even though it was such a small space, and he was sick to his stomach when he finished. He said he when he was done that he felt far sicker than whoever defiled the bathroom in the first place.
NotReady4PrimeTime, RN
5 Articles; 7,358 Posts
Some of these are hard to top. I've sprayed myself in the face with any variety of nasty fluid, had a toddler pee out the side of his diaper onto my pants while he slept on my lap, blown apart the silicone section of tubing on more than one feeding tube setup by forgetting to take the cap off the patient end, pulled the spike out of a bag of IV fluid while it was still in the pressure bag... the list of those kinds of things is long. But I think having to fill out TWO staff injury forms for chair-related head injuries in the same month might be my wow-you're-special-aren't-you moments. The first one was just before we got new task chairs on the small 8-bed open unit where I was working at the time. It was closing in on 5 am, it was my third night and all I wanted was to sit for a minute. There was this one chair that had a broken back, where if you leaned back a little against it the chair would recline dramatically. It also had no wheel locks on it. Long story short, I went to sit on it, misjudged the distance to the seat, grabbed for the back and as I sat, the chair reclined AND rolled away from me. My fanny hit the floor and I hit my head on the edge of the desk, but not so hard that it even really hurt. But it was witnessed by EVERYBODY on the shift with me. I duly filed a staff injury form for OH&S. A couple of weeks later we had gotten new chairs, really lovely ones that had multiple adjustments for both comfort and efficiency. I was on days and had been shown what each of the various knobs and handles did. Wanting to show off my knowledge, I proceeded to demonstrate how to adjust the angle of the seat back... while standing to the side of the chair leaning across the seat. The seat back adjusted all right. It sprang forward, smacked me in the side of the head and knocked me on my butt. In front of our attending and the whole unit. I suffered through a neuro exam in the middle of the unit - I was completely fine - and when the doc suggested I should go home, I told her that if I wasn't safe to stay at work I DEFINITELY wasn't driving home. But I dutifully filled out another staff injury form. It's a wonder I didn't get a visit from our OH&S coordinator. Some might say it explains a few things though.