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...
O2 Christmas trees hurt like a mofo. Especially when you're bent down in a patient room plugging/unplugging something and stand up and whack your skull against one. It hurt, but I didn't realize it had drawn blood until the patient asked me if I knew there was blood running down my face. I wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or curse.
When just starting out I didn't realize that tube feeding bags had caps on them. When I went to refill the feed it poured all over me. My scrubs stank all day long. Another time as a nurse with more experience I floated to the ICU. We had a pt who was not doing well at all and a CT was ordered. As I and the nurse I was working with got the pt ready to be moved to the CT room the nurse told me to take along his monitor. I had the whole monitor detached from the wall to take to CT when she started laughing and said "no, just detach the little portable monitor from the whole thing!" Took me a while to figure out how to reattach the big monitor but I got it done! Next day my nurse manager got a laugh at my expense when she heard the story.
Specializes in Psych, Peds, Education, Infection Control.
Ever given a transoccular medication? I have.
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.
Good times lol
I'm dying, OMG...transocular, I'm going to have to remember that.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
Ever given a transoccular medication? I have.
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.
Good times lol
I don't know how you managed that one because I always end up shooting MYSELF in the eye.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
canceled
YUP. That's a dumb question. So was the one where I asked my orientee why he hadn't charted pedal pulses. There was a moment of silence where I swear Willy was trying to think of a reason I would be asking what a dumb question (or else trying to think up a tactful answer) and then he said "Because he's bilateral BKA?" Oh, right. Forgot about that.
This was a long time ago and nursing was much different back then. I was asked to come in on my off day and work orthopedics, although I'm a CVI nurse. Got there after breakfast and had to run to catch up AM care and get meds done for 8 patients before PT came to get them. I decided to enlist the aid of one patient's 'wife,' who was just sitting there at the bedside. Just set up the bath pan, towels and clean gown, and asked her to help him with it. I scurried on to the next patient. When I came back a long while later 'wife' had left and the patient was sitting there all cleaned up. He sheepishly said, "I never had my sister give me a bath before." I think I was more embarrassed than he was!
Hahahahaha! That's a good one! I wish my patients and families just "did what I asked" even when it's appropriate.
I accidentally sent a sample of saline to the lab for a drug screen
I had pulled the sample from the wrong port of a foley, placed in a very active and combative old lady... gaaaaah!
Later, when I found my glorious old gal waving her deflated tubing around like a flag of mockery, I doubled over laughing at my stupidity... because I really wanted to cry.
No wonder I only got a perfect 10cc's...
I called the lab to tell them to not bother, but before I could tell them it was a bad sample, they happily declared it negative
I did this as a nurse extern! The nurse later pulled me aside and told me what I did the next day; the pt was on bedrest so the foley didn't come out until after I left for the evening. I was so embarrassed!
I was a new nurse and had not been off orientation for very long, but I had been around long enough to know that a certain surgeon had a reputation of raking nurses over the coals just for the fun of it. I had one of her patients and she decided to place a chest tube at bedside. I had never seen a chest tube placed let alone assisted with one. (While probably a common procedure for ER or ICU, in oncology we rarely had patients with chest tubes.) The charge nurse was busy hanging chemo and so I was just real honest with the surgeon and told her I'd never done it before but if she told me exactly what to do, I was up for the challenge. She actually was very gracious and despite her reputation for being a total witch, I found her to be a very willing teacher. She explained every step as I helped get her sterile field set up on the bedside table. So, she gets gowned, masked, gloved and gets the patient draped. Then she tells me to get the lidocaine vial and hold it so she can draw some up with a syringe, stressing not to break sterility. I get the vial and flip the cap off and it lands right on the edge of her sterile field. There was about a 10 second pause where we just kind of stared at the cap lying there. I must have looked completely mortified (or petrified) as I waited for the yelling and screaming to commence. I guess she had a moment of compassion, because she just kinda chuckled. She took the packaging in her hand from the syringe she had just opened and used the edge to push the cap off the field, and said next time you might want to pop the cap off away from me and down toward the floor.
In one of my last days of clinicals in nursing school I woke up not feeling very well. I only had one day left for absence and I really wanted to use it on my last day. After all I wasn't throwing up just having some mild diarrhea I think I ate something that didn't agree with me. I went to the store and got some of those chewable peptos and went to clinicals. One of the patients I had started having chest pain and she was on IV antibx and lyte replacements and I was running back and forth. I had to draw a tropinin lab and she was in one of those reverse iso rooms and they are a little warmer than other rooms. Anyways I was standing at the bedside drawing up blood and I started sweating and in my head I was like "oh no I'm going to throw up" the whole time I was kinda breathing through it and when I was done I like pretty much ran out of there but luckily I was near the nurses station. One of my classmates had the keys to the bathroom and I'm like power walking to her demanding her to open the door NOW. She was like jangling the keys trying to open the door but it was too late.. I started throwing up all over the floor and there was a big trash can on wheels next to me so I ran to that but it has no trash bag in it. I was mortified. And the EVS guy was like "it's ok it's not my trash can today." But I saw him wheeling the trash can down the hall to take it to get cleaned.... ugh
The most embarrassing thing I did was to try and speak Spanish to a new dad. Instead of telling him "we are going to get draw your baby's blood for some labs" I said "we are going to draw your baby's wine" (sangria instead of sangre) Not sure how to spell it. He laughed. He understood enough of what I said. So glad he though it was funny. I don't think I will ever try to speak Spanish again. At least I tried.
In one of my last days of clinicals in nursing school I woke up not feeling very well. I only had one day left for absence and I really wanted to use it on my last day. After all I wasn't throwing up just having some mild diarrhea I think I ate something that didn't agree with me. I went to the store and got some of those chewable peptos and went to clinicals. One of the patients I had started having chest pain and she was on IV antibx and lyte replacements and I was running back and forth. I had to draw a tropinin lab and she was in one of those reverse iso rooms and they are a little warmer than other rooms. Anyways I was standing at the bedside drawing up blood and I started sweating and in my head I was like "oh no I'm going to throw up" the whole time I was kinda breathing through it and when I was done I like pretty much ran out of there but luckily I was near the nurses station. One of my classmates had the keys to the bathroom and I'm like power walking to her demanding her to open the door NOW. She was like jangling the keys trying to open the door but it was too late.. I started throwing up all over the floor and there was a big trash can on wheels next to me so I ran to that but it has no trash bag in it. I was mortified. And the EVS guy was like "it's ok it's not my trash can today." But I saw him wheeling the trash can down the hall to take it to get cleaned.... ugh
Wow, sick days for clinicals? If we missed a day we had to pay the instructor's salary to come make the day up with us.
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.
You're a better person than I am - I would have told EVERYONE what I did so everyone could have enjoyed the moment.
Just recently I was assisting my favorite intensivist with a chest tube insertion. He was holding the metal cup for me to squirt the betadine into, but of course, I was overestimating my ability to aim and was way too far away from the cup to squirt accurately. His gown ended up getting a fair splash of betadine. He decided to address it by saying, "God, calivianya, if you think I'm that dirty you could have just told me to take a shower. Squirting me with betadine is a little much." I love that man. :)
The ones about vitals on dead people remind me of something I witnessed recently. We'd been running our butts off on a patient who was dying despite everything we were trying. We even tried CRRT for about an hour but he was too unstable. Family finally decided that enough was enough, we withdrew care, and the patient expired.
I was giving the family time to visit privately, and while in my other patient's room, the nephrologist finally decided to show up. He somehow managed to ignore the fact that the MONITORS, the VENTILATOR, the IV PUMPS, and even the DIALYSIS MACHINE were off and that the patient wasn't connected to anything, and was trying to ask the family about the patient's history of kidney failure. They asked him to leave the room, and informed me later they really didn't want to get a bill from him.
I could maybe understand missing the fact that the patient's dead on a regular floor, where there isn't a lot of equipment in the room, but when you miss the fact that the patient's suddenly extubated, the ventilator is off, all IV pumps are off, the dialysis machine is off, and the monitor isn't showing anything... that's a special kind of clueless.
Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP
4 Articles; 5,259 Posts
O2 Christmas trees hurt like a mofo. Especially when you're bent down in a patient room plugging/unplugging something and stand up and whack your skull against one. It hurt, but I didn't realize it had drawn blood until the patient asked me if I knew there was blood running down my face. I wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or curse.