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 was irrigating a foley with CBI that had clots. Urine and blood splashed back into my face. Had to go to the ER for treatment. I was fine. Patient had nothing. Just felt really dumb.
I had a patient die close to shift change in the ER. My relief arrived and saw how flustered and behind I was and offered to help out. Huge evil grin from a stressed and overtired canoehead, I asked her to take lady B off the bedpan. Off she goes, and about five minutes later comes out of the dead lady's room with a puzzled look. "Canoe, she's not on a bedpan." (No I guess she's not) Spot on assessment skills, huh?
This goes back a ways. I was a fresh, new nurse brimming with confidence with all my skills. I had a new resident with a G-tube and an SP cath. This lady needed some tylenol, which of course in the liquid formula is red. You can probably already tell where this is going. Yep, I instilled a dose of tylenol into the tubing of the SP cath instead of the G-tube. I had a moment of total panic when she was suddenly bleeding into her foley bag until I realized it was the tylenol I had added to her urine. I wasn't so brimming with confidence after that screw up!
Funny story from just this week. I had a patient come back from surgery with 4 JP drains. 3 of them Y'd together and set to wall suction going into one canister. The surgeon wanted me to take one of those drains and set it to its own canister which I did. But I had to cap off where it was Y'd I because the suction would not work unless it was, so I just put a cap to cap off an IV on it.
There was a resident in the case that was just a jerk to me. Just acted like I wasn't fast enough or doing "exactly" what he wanted. Mind you my other patient was going south and this guy was pulling out all his lines and hitting the call light every 5 minutes. It was crazy.
So he comes in and has me turn of the suction so he could hear something, which I do. Then I go to turn it back on but the one bulb didn't deflate so I squeezed it. When I did that, the cap flew off the Y and blood flew out all over this resident!! I was so embarrassed but was holding in my laughter because this guy was just not nice. I did not tell a soul on my unit what I did.
I'm currently a tech at a decent sized hospital (until I graduate in May... Yay!).
Just last week, I was busy doing morning care, everything was a little chaotic, requests flying like bullets... You know the drill. As I was helping a patient use the commode and fielding approximately three million calls about another patient's telemetry that kept going off, a nurse popped her head in the door and said, "Hey, 12's going home! Can you take her IV out?" I tossed out a "Yep!" and helped my patient finish up and get back in bed.
Soo.... I charge down the hallway and come to the closed door. I hastily don my gown and gloves (already sweating and flustered from going at breakneck speed that morning) and then knock and enter the room. "Hello, Ms. X!" I exclaimed in a very enthusiastic voice, "I'm here to take your IV out so you can go home!" The patient and her son stared at me with very blank faces and an awkward silence hung over the room. "Um... What?" she finally asked. "Your IV..." I started, and then glanced up at the room number on the board.
I wasn't in 12.
Needless to say, the patient and her son didn't let me forget that one the entire twelve hour shift. I didn't tell any coworkers, though.
Its when you go to inject air into a morphine vial but the pressure blasts out the back end and shoots out right into your patients eye like a water gun.
I'm currently a tech at a decent sized hospital (until I graduate in May... Yay!).
Just last week, I was busy doing morning care, everything was a little chaotic, requests flying like bullets... You know the drill. As I was helping a patient use the commode and fielding approximately three million calls about another patient's telemetry that kept going off, a nurse popped her head in the door and said, "Hey, 12's going home! Can you take her IV out?" I tossed out a "Yep!" and helped my patient finish up and get back in bed.
Soo.... I charge down the hallway and come to the closed door. I hastily don my gown and gloves (already sweating and flustered from going at breakneck speed that morning) and then knock and enter the room. "Hello, Ms. X!" I exclaimed in a very enthusiastic voice, "I'm here to take your IV out so you can go home!" The patient and her son stared at me with very blank faces and an awkward silence hung over the room. "Um... What?" she finally asked. "Your IV..." I started, and then glanced up at the room number on the board.
I wasn't in 12.
Needless to say, the patient and her son didn't let me forget that one the entire twelve hour shift. I didn't tell any coworkers, though.
There's a good lesson here, to make sure you're properly ID'ing patients before treatments. It's a nice lesson to have set in in a mildly embarrassing manner now versus at a route cause analysis meeting later on in your nursing career.
One of my psych patients hit the floor when we were bringing them back from smoke break. I was a new nurse and couldn't find a pulse, so I hollered for the techs to bring the code cart. Well, luckily the patient was only having a vasovagal reaction for whatever reason, but I still thought he probably needed some oxygen so I got all the tubing and got it attached, then realized I had no idea how to turn on the oxygen. So I started turning the most likely looking part, thinking I would soon be getting oxygen. Unfortunately I unscrewed the part that held the gauges on. I was left standing there, holding the knob, while all the gauges hit the floor. One of my techs reattached the gauges and turned on the oxygen. By then, the patient had regained consciousness and everybody, techs, patients and all, were standing there staring at me. After that, I got my preceptor to go over the entire cart with me but I never told her why I had such a sudden interest.
1) in nursing school I was going to do my first med admin via g-tube. I get ready to flush the tube and can't get it to push. I try again, harder, with no luck. I told my preceptor the tube is blocked and it won't flush. She looked at me and asked if I had removed the plug. Yes, I was trying to flush a plugged tube!
2) I had a pt on xolair, which is a very thick subcu admin for uncontrolled asthma. I reconstituted it with the sterile water and drew it up with the 18g per protocol, then switched to the 25g for administration. I was ready to administer, pt's arm was prepped, I injected it, started the slow push, and got a face full of Xolair. Apparently I hadn't fully screwed the needle into the luer lock, and the med came out the end of the syringe and never made it to the needle! I apologized to the pt (who happens to be a healthcare provider so they understood) and managed to get a free vial to replace that one since it's nearly $1,000 per single-use vial!
There ARE dumb questions... during an abdominal hyst, I was documenting the preop diagnosis and it included 'undesired fertility'. So I asked the surgeon "are we tying her tubes, too?" Silence. "Sure, just as soon as I get her uterus out."
Specializes in Addictions, psych, corrections, transfers.
In my first clinical, I was assisting a man to get out of bed and I thought his other leg was folded under him. I asked him, "Where is your other leg?" As I was trying to take the 4 blankets off him. I finally got the blankets off and realized it was amputated. The patient stated, "I guess it walked away." So funny! Talk about being red faced but we both laughed about it.
We always double check. Hate to bury anyone who's not really all the way dead.
nrsang97, BSN, RN
2,602 Posts
I was irrigating a foley with CBI that had clots. Urine and blood splashed back into my face. Had to go to the ER for treatment. I was fine. Patient had nothing. Just felt really dumb.