Lest you think that this blog has turned into a monologue on the idiocy of people other than myself, I have a story for you about my own idiocy. Read on, gentle reader, and remember me in your prayers...
In the middle of the night I trundled off to a distant ward to review the person in bed 3 who was, according to the taskboard, mildly hypotensive and thus warranting a breeze-by from myself. I got there and took a quick look at her observation chart, and was surprised to see that if anything she had been mildly hypertensive.
I grabbed a nearby nurse and asked if perhaps the most recent obs hadn't been charted, but they had. That nurse was also surprised that I was there to review the patient in bed 3 and suggested that perhaps a mistake had been made and that someone had meant me to review the patient in bed 4.
"Choh! Typical!", I said, "Choh! Lucky it wasn't an emergency! Choh! Can't believe anything on the task board these days! Not like the good old days when I first started, last Monday! Choh!", and so on and so on. (This may surprise you if you're under the impression that I'm basically a nice guy - I'd like to think I am but at 3 a.m. I get pretty damn self-righteous.)
But then when I got the chart for bed 4, he was pretty much the same. No hypotension there. So I grabbed the nurse again and pointed this out to her and started out again on my "Choh!" routine whilst unfolding my taskboard printout to show her the errant job that had all these errors in it. Wrong patient, wrong vitals...
... and I got that awful sinking feeling that you get when you realize that you're the dickhead. I was on the wrong ward.
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4 comments:
Speaking as somebody who has worked night shifts the majority of his adult working life, It's not hard to do. I once sat outside a house in the taxi I was driving at 2:30am for 20 minutes waiting for somebody to come out who had supposedly booked me to drive them to the bus station. I eventually worked out that I was in the wrong street, but it took 2 angry phonecalls from the client for me to realise it.
Nightshifts are evil.
The proof that I'm not a robot is "kadris 30". Which actually sounds like a name you would call a robot, or a character from Logan's Run.
Dear Kadris 30,
That's a great story. Was the street you were in the next one over or something similar sounding? Or were you just outside some totally random house tooting the horn every now and then?
PTR
I was about 2 blocks away. And I didn't toot the horn....luckily. I got them to the bus station in time too, by the way. Just.
choh?
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