Someone helped explained to me why this happened. Like sometimes people who work in a specific profession they become overly focused on, like in my case, how alcohol affects the brain, even in small quantities.

I stumbled into this place thinking I was going to kick my issues with depression and abuse.
I was hoping for coping skills. Instead I had a warped experience in denial.

The admitting nurse was strange. She asked me how much I had to drink in the past 5 weeks. When I said I drank every other day, when I visited my parents, she got this look of disgust even though, I mentioned I only drank 1 or 2 drinks at a time (ie beer, a glass of wine with dinner). I then told her I drank 5 beers at a party two weeks earlier this look of disgust washed over her and she whipped out these forms, and had me sign them. I refused to sign them at first asking why the hell she had me sign up for a detox? She said oh everyone has to sign these forms. So I signed them. I asked her where I was going, she said why do you think you’re here. I said that I had a bad experience 8 months prior that was causing me problems with sleeping and depression. The problem involved an incident at a party. I was drinking. I can’t say I was hammered. I have full memory of everything that happened. The nurse shook her head and lead me off to the detox, even though I still didn’t even have an idea where I was.

I was given a “sleeping pill” by a nurse the first night I was there. I clued in I was in a detox, when the nurse came up and gave me a vitamin B tablet and a diuretic to “wash out the alcohol”. When I sat up and said I hadn’t been drinking she said oh your reeking of alcohol. She then came back with this sleeping pill and insisted I take it, and not spit it out.

If you have had the odd drunken moment in life I am not of the belief that you should be shoved into treatment. The odd drunken experience being rare and easily recallable.

The nurses insisted I was a stinking alkie the whole time I was there. They commented on how drunk I was. I told them it was impossible, and they might as well insist I am diabetic instead.I drank two Zimas with a friend at a party 3 days prior to entering the clinic. They insisted I drank very heavily nearly everyday in the prior 5 weeks, and I was having black outs where I was having none, and hearing voices without me verifying I was. They insisted I was drinking fairly regularly in the prior 8 months as well. I maybe only had 4 drinks a month. They called this heavy drinking.

Disgustingly my charts also try to say I took benzodiazepine, as of no consequence of them giving it to me! I am not a pill popper. I had never taken anything like that before in my life.I guess because they couldn’t find alcohol in my system they insisted that I must’ve took something.

I feel my experience is a bunch of doctors and nurses insisting they’re right, without respecting or listening to the patient. I think the benzodiazepine wound on my charts because they were so blindly sure I had something in my system, that they couldn’t beleive they were wrong. this was a $7000 a night facility! I guess they had a reputation at stake.

I don’t care what title you wear LPN, DR… If you don’t listen to your patients, you might as well quit. Patients know themselves best, so listen. Yeah my case is weird but people do get lost in the system with illnesses that could’ve been easily diagnosed and treated.

This treatment has caused horrible psychological damage and has made me incredibly angry at the “caring” profession.

My supervisor was so nice about it. Fortunately before I left, I told the nurses I reported to that I gave all meds up to noon (when I left).

As this is a small facility, we have one on staff pharmacist. She said that guidelines indicate that each med I didn’t sign off constituted a med error and not only was I in trouble but it would raise her error rate. I felt like such a fool! I have been a nurse for 8 years in the acute care setting and I had never done something this stupid. At other facilities, they would call and ask if you gave the med, and have you sign it when you came in the next day. It isn’t this way at this small facility.

My supervisor (who I have worked with at another facility for years), didn’t write me up (thank GOD), but he did say that “if I didn’t know you, at a 50% error rate, I would have to let you go.”

That last comment was an eye opener.
I felt so stupid and incompitent. I have always been “the nurse” that everyone would come to with questions, concerns, hard IV starts.
I’ve been a house supervisor, charge
nurse, etc.

I appreciated them being so kind to me and I made it clear that I didn’t intend to make their job difficult.
I am taking 2 days off from another job to get my head together. They said that they could tell how upset I was and that I could do better.

I just felt like such an idiot.

Thank you for having this website so I could vent.

linda

The RR RN gave 80 of Lasix. I gave another 80. That’s double the dose for a patient that is post-op, and quadruple the “normal” dose. Even if it had been just 40, or even 20, I would have let him know. What if 160mg gave a specific response, and the MD thought that 80mg was responsible?

Lasix isn’t exactly a Flinstone vitamin, ya know.

I recall that two years ago, recommendations were issued by a joint team from Stanford and UC-San Francisco regarding the “best practices” felt to miniminze or eliminate medical errors, including the subject of medications. These were published in 2001 in an issue of the JAMA.

Keep up your excellent work, DG.

Even with those things, medication errors still occur. Poor charting habits, not having uniform charting procedures for all departments (this mainly refers to the ED, OR, and PACU,) and frequent changes in orders that are not caught, all contribute to the confusion.

Med errors are mortifying. I’m ultra-cautious with the meds I give to my patients because, frankly, I’m terrified of making a mistake that could result in complications for one of the kids. Not only do I follow 3 (I do 5) check method, I also follow the 5 (6) rights of administration. Better safe than sorry.

As far as medication errors, steps have been taken to modernize the system of delivering medications to prevent the sort of errors, which are minor, which you cited in your story. Finger-pointing at individuals, whether doctors or nurses, ought to be shunned in favor of correcting these mistakes on the basis of a systems approach. The systems approach is what made anesthesiology and our aviation industry so safe today.

I have also felt that nurses ought to have more education, along with continuing medical courses (CME), in pharmacology. Knowledgeable nurses are the best partners of physicians, particularly in the hospital setting.

By the way, you ought not to feel bad for your errors. They were minor and we need to learn from them. Dr. Atul Gawande wrote in his best-selling book, COMPLICATIONS, that while perfection is impossible, it is not unreasonable to try to aim for it as best as we can.

I was a new nurse and although had infused R before, must not have had to pay attention to the stop
time (as in, the other exposure I had to Reopro was when a patient came from CCL at 5pm with it infusing, and I went home at 7pm). I just wasn’t paying attention. It ended up infusing for about 2-3 hours
longer than it should have. (I called pharmacy when it only had the tiniest amount left, thinking
that they would have sent me another bag already!)