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 had a confused patient in ICU back in the late 70's. I noticed a pair of glasses on her bedside table and put them on this little old lady. They were huge! I came on the next day and she still had them on. Her doctor came by later in the shift and asked, "Have you seen my glasses?" Then it dawned on me why her glasses case said "Dr. Reed" on it.
I had a confused patient in ICU back in the late 70's. I noticed a pair of glasses on her bedside table and put them on this little old lady. They were huge! I came on the next day and she still had them on. Her doctor came by later in the shift and asked, "Have you seen my glasses?" Then it dawned on me why her glasses case said "Dr. Reed" on it.
OMG! This is the best one yet! I laughed so hard the cats all became alarmed and ran off!
I had a confused patient in ICU back in the late 70's. I noticed a pair of glasses on her bedside table and put them on this little old lady. They were huge! I came on the next day and she still had them on. Her doctor came by later in the shift and asked, "Have you seen my glasses?" Then it dawned on me why her glasses case said "Dr. Reed" on it.
That was a laugh on top of a laugh - '... the cats all became alarmed and ran off!'. This thread is THERAPEUTIC!
I know, right? Like a gift - like finding a $20.00 bill in your winter coat pocket you didn't realize was there! I snorted hard enough to shoot my right temporal lobe out of my right nostril at mach 12!
This thread is pure undiluted magic! It's silly, and fun - like comfort food for the soul. I hope it lasts forever!
Specializes in home care,teaching,private duty,etc..
Working on an acute adult psych unit we get some off the wall requests so when a man from Russia asked, "Where can I get some sex?" I said, "We don't have that here." He insisted and then asked more clearly if he could get some socks! That I told him I could help him with. At least we all had a good laugh.
This is off the original topic but I think follows where the thread has been going.
I once had a confused patient pee in his drinking cup. Don't worry, he didn't drink it. I found it on the floor at least a foot away from his bed. The kicker? He somehow managed to do that without triggering his bed alarm, falling, OR sloshing a single drop.
When I was a new grad I did my time in the night shift trenches where most of the practical jokers seemed to congregate. Unfortunately this setting leaned toward my own natural propensity for childish pranks, which on occasion caught me a bit of heat for from time to time.
This was a large teaching hospital affiliated with a university, and we had flocks of interns, gaggles of residents, chief residents, fellows and attendings. They all came in a pack early in the morning to do rounds, making general nuisances of themselves under foot, and hogging up all the available space.
There was a long hallway leading to the unit - which was of a med/surg variety, and the unit itself was a large square with the nursing station in the middle. One day after not enough cumulative sleep and too much caffeine I got the bright idea of super gluing a quarter to the floor at the mouth of the hallway opening into the unit proper. There, from a vantage point of being seated at the anterior side of the nurses station I got a front row seat to watch every MD that entered the unit try to pick up that damn quarter.
You'd be surprised how many tried … this amused me for a total of 3 days before the wrath of God (in the form of the nurse manager) came down like a hammer on the practical joke shift. A rather terse note appeared in the break room about the quarter, and if it was ever discovered who was responsible that there would be hell to pay!
Later that day housekeeping came in with a floor buffer to remove the offending quarter …
I never revealed to anyone that quiet me was the hellion who glued that damn quarter to the floor, until now … 23 years later …
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I had my only baby 2 weeks after passing the last pencil and paper NCLEX - 4 tests, 100 questions each spread over 2 days. 6 weeks later with tears in my eyes I left my baby at home with my husband and embarked on my new nursing career as a new grad.
What amazing monetary recompense did I get in exchange for this sacrifice? $12.75/hr, the year was 1994 …
Because I was breast feeding at the time I had to pump breast milk at work. Storing it safely became a problem once the refrigerator in the break room conked out for a few days.
I had a large insulated Tupperware bottle container with my first name: XXXXXX's Milk. With our break room fridge broken I had no alternative but to store my breast milk in the patient refrigerator on the unit where we kept patient snacks, and unit supplies like single serving coffee creamers and little bitty half & half containers.
One day at the tail end of my night shift I came out of a patient room to find a gathering of exhausted looking interns all gathered around the coffee maker and unit refrigerator. Dietary was late restocking, so we had precious little stock on hand. It was then that I noticed my Tupperware container with: XXXXXX's Milk sitting on the counter in front of the coffee machine.
With a barely contained smirk I approached the coffee guzzlers to inform them what they were drinking was my milk.
They thought I was being a selfish jag not wanting to share my own stash, and not much caring I was protesting either. It wasn't until I was able to make them really understand that it was my milk did they care. All but one turned green and spit it into the adjacent sink - but the remaining one just shrugged and walked away, still sipping his coffee.
OK, here's one that's not from nursing, but is funny (at least to me), and fits into the 'telling on yourself, if you dare...' for sure. I haven't admitted this to anyone except a friend or two, and my ex.
A long time ago, I was in a big-city downtown, interviewing for my first real job (in my first career). I was told to go over to this largish building a few blocks away to do something with personnel, and I forget the details, but I had time to kill - had to wait for someone else to come back with me to our building.
So instead of taking the elevator to the ground floor, I just went through a door into the stairwell, walked down several flights, and then tried a door. It was locked. Went back up 1 floor. Locked. Down a few more. Locked. Then, as if matters couldn't be made worse, I got to what looked like the ground floor (and I'd given up on trying the doors on the last 2-3 floors). There were double doors, which opened into a small space, and - oops, now THOSE doors had locked behind me, and there was only a service elevator, and a do-not-push-unless-in-an-emergency (alarmed) door to the outside. So now, someone's going to be looking for me (the guy I was supposed to wait on) in a bit, I'm locked into this small room on the ground floor, but it was almost like being in the basement.
After maybe 10-15 minutes of thinking of things like 'Just how often does ANYONE ever come down into this room using that service elevator?', and imagining my dried bones in a heap of tattered clothing being found in the corner, I thought oh boy, I don't really want to, but ... I pulled the fire alarm (hey, at least one of THOSE was in that little room!).
Barely a minute or two after I'd pulled it, someone else came through those double doors! Not a building maint. person - someone else who'd made the same mistake as me (but wasn't it stupid that most of the doors into each business floor was locked?). I said "DON'T LET GO OF THAT DOOR!!!", he didn't, and we went back up to the first floor (locked), second floor, and ... it was UNLOCKED! (Remember, I'd given up and hadn't tried the last 2-3 on the way down because it seemed like they were all locked).
People were gathering their things up and evacuating the building. The alarm was going off. I said (of course) "Wow, what's going on?!?" (ha ha) to a woman getting up from her desk as that other guy and I funneled into the pack of people leaving the building.
So that's how I inadvertently emptied a 12-or-so-stories business building. Well, everyone needed a mid-morning break, right? ...
I had one of these moments today...actually today was mostly stupid silly moments. The main one was after spending 20 minutes changing the PICC line dressing on my patient I went to spike and hang her next dose of antibiotics. No big deal right...well I tried to hurry up just a little too much and instead of the spike going in the bag the first time it went into the knuckle of my thumb. It wasn't bleeding or damaged but it did hurt like I did some serious damage. Now hours later I have a faint bruise on the knuckle and a tiny red mark. I guess those are my reminders that the spike should not be thrust into the IV bag like a spear...
I had a patient in the ICU who was a daily weight. This was in the old days before bedscales when we had to put the patient in a sling to weigh them. I was very frustrated because my weight was about 35 lbs less than the previous day. I lowered the patient back on to his bed, got the sling out from under him, zeroed the scale and repeated the process. Still 35 lbs off. Suddenly it hit me. He had a BKA the day before. Duh
suseliz, MSN, RN
44 Posts
I had a confused patient in ICU back in the late 70's. I noticed a pair of glasses on her bedside table and put them on this little old lady. They were huge! I came on the next day and she still had them on. Her doctor came by later in the shift and asked, "Have you seen my glasses?" Then it dawned on me why her glasses case said "Dr. Reed" on it.