As I was talking to Braedon about my job the other day we agreed that one great thing about working in health care as a nurse is that I have the best "how was work today?" answers. This sparked my idea to start a thread of posts about my best and (maybe) worst experiences of being a nurse. Once I figure out this whole blogging thing I'll make it a little tab you can select but in the meantime this will have to do!
Shadowing a nurse for clinical as a student can be really awkward. You basically follow around and do whatever the nurse does- and hope that they actually let you do a few things too. It gets especially awkward when you get up to follow them but their actually just going to the bathroom and don't tell you that's their destination.
One particular clinical shift at the hospital, I was talking to my nurse about administering meds via g-tube for one of our patients. She told me to draw up each of the meds into the same syringe. I politely (and hopefully tactfully) told her we had been taught in nursing school to draw each med up separately, one of the reasons being that if anything happened during administration we would know exactly how much of what med had actually been delivered.
She disregarded my concerns and told me to draw them all up into the same syringe. There were no drug-drug interactions between the meds- I was just giving liquid multivitamins- so I shut my mouth and did as I was told. Another quirk of being a nursing student- "you know nothing".
Liquid multivitamins are disgusting. They smell, and when drawn up with several other vitamins turn a glowing green. They also have a weird oily film, which at the time I did not know, but would soon find out.
I measured the correct amount of vitamin and flipped the syringe so it was pointing upwards and I could push the air out, leaving just the vitamins to be administered.
Next thing I knew I had pushed just a little to hard, and the vitamins were so oily that I literally shot them straight up into the air.
Glowing green goop dripped from the ceiling and down the wall.
Lucky for me, my nurse was cool and we both starting laughing uncontrollably. My patient was unconscious (not so lucky for him), however he didn't have to witness his "incompetent nurse" squirting his vitamins all over the room.
My nurse had to reorder the meds, and needless to say, understood why we should have just drawn up one instead of all three. I'm sure they made this "draw up one med at a time rule" partly because of clumsy nurses like me.
If you know me, this story is probably of no surprise. One of the many reasons why my nickname is "Pure Luck" (hence the name of the blog).
