Lesson to learn :)

Today is a very exhausting day for me, early in the morning i was tagged with a senior staff nurse to take care of a patient. Few hours later, my deputy nursing manager (DNM) came to talk to that senior SN. After whispering for few minutes, my DNM walked to me and tell me that I will be in charged of this patient all by myself until the next shift because of limited staff available on that day. MAN! I was so shocked to hear that because Im not ready at all since all these while we were tagged with senior staff to learn new stuff only, I never handled a patient all alone before. Although I was a bit reluctant but another side of me told me, why not? So I just said okay to the DNM and told her I will try my best.

My first task was to dilute Morphine for my patient, I need to break 4 ampules of Morphine to get the dosage that I want. Unfortunately, when I was breaking the 4th one, the tiny piece of glass somehow slipped out of the plastic cover and cut my thumb. It is not painful at all but the worst thing is that my blood flowed out like mad just because of a small yet deep cut. I tried my best to hide it because if others realise this, things will get far more complicated such as I have to see my ward sister to inform her about this, and earn myself extra scolding and nagging, and lots and lots of forms filling, the writing of incident report, worst come to worst, I need to go emergency department to get my blood checked, to see whether I've infected by any viruses or not. -.- AND! I will add one more 'needle stick injury' incident to our statistic and affect my ward bonus. HA-HA. Funny. Okay come back :) So yeah, I tried so hard to stop the bleeding, i quickly wrapped my thumb with tissue and continue to dilute my Morphine because patient needs it already but the blood just cant stop flowing out, until there's blood stain all over my syringe, patient's plates, cups, everything that I touched, you name it. -.-

This is ampoule lo, we need to break it to get our drugs.

Second task, I need to take patient's blood for Arterial Blood Gases analysis. I syringed out the blood like a pro, everything went well until the very last step, which is before I inject the blood into the machine to analyse the blood... sobs, before I inject the blood into the machine, we are required to roll the syringe to expel air bubbles in the blood. Due to my injured thumb, my hand cannot really function well so I think I rolled too vigorously until I heard something like 'piak' on the floor. When I look at my syringe, its already empty!OH NOOOO.. The plunger just fell on the floor, and of course, including the blood, its everywhere.. T.T There was an abang there, repairing the machine so I called him, abang, darah jatuh... with my big eyes and kesian look. He went speechless for few minutes and during that few minutes of awkwardness I was soooo regret because why did I choose to tell him? He is not even a cleaner, who can help me to clean up the mess, or someone who can help me to reverse time, or a nurse to help me to retake my patient's blood. He is just an outsider, repairing our ABG machine.. sweat max... But he replied me la in the end, haha ( crows fly over )-.-

So yeah, after the thumb cutting and blood dropping incident, Im seriously dyed with blood, I think I cut my thumb at 11am, until now (9pm), my thumb is still bleeding! I just dont know how deep is the cut. sigh. My pants, my shoes, dyed with blood too..

After the choatic events, I really want to thank God that nothing 'badder' happens to me and my patient. My patient is healthy and stable, he loves me, he keep promoting me to his family members, and keep saying thanks to me when I ended my 12 hours shift for today :)

This is really my first experience in taking over a patient and its definately a lesson to learn :)