Bad Day at Work

Room 37 is the unluckiest room in the emergency department at my hospital. It seems like every time I am assigned to the rooms 36, 37, and 38, the day turns into a disaster. The most memorable events from the past six months:

• There was the psychotic patient who attempted to attack me before having to be tackled and held down by no fewer than 4 security guards so we could sedate him.
• Or the woman who had a miscarriage and was given an abortion pill so she could expel the products of conception and almost bled to death. Over the hour it took for the surgical team to be prepped for her emergency D&C, I had to give her 4 units of packed RBCs, 2 units of frozen plasma, four bags of saline, and a unit of platelets. In other words, we more than replaced her entire blood volume.
• There was the patient who had a respiratory infection that was aggravated by the fibroids that were caused by his previous COVID infection. I gave him his antibiotic (Cefepime) and within a minute he was deep into an anaphylactic reaction. I had to run to the medication room and grab the Epi kit.

Still, none of that compares to the last time I was covering room 37. Things had been going smoothly to that point. I was six hours into my shift, and things were great. I sent my patient from room 37 upstairs, and received my next. She had come into the ED complaining of abdominal pain. She was writhing around, moaning in pain, and covered in what looked like a raging case of ringworm. I needed to get an IV so I could draw her blood, give her some pain medication, and give IV access for the CT team, who were going to need that access so they could inject her with the contrast dye. She was thrashing about as I went to start the IV, and moved just as the needle broke the skin. That needle went into her arm, came out, and immediately went through my glove and into my left index finger.

Oh shit.

I pulled my glove off, and my punctured finger was coated in a mixture of her blood and my own. After more than 35 years working in the medical field, I finally received the most common nursing injury- a contaminated needle stick.

I reported it to the charge nurse, and his only comment was that I needed to stop goofing off and move patients through my section because we had almost ten people in the waiting room. So I went and found the charge nurse for the next section over, who gave me the needlestick hotline phone number.

Within two hours, they had tested patient’s blood and determined that she didn’t have Hepatitis or HIV, then tested my own to ensure the same. They also tested my blood to make sure that I still had a positive titer for Hepatitis B.

The rest of my shift went to shit. By the time I left at the end of my shift, I was ready for the weekend to start, because I had had enough. When the weekend came, I got to spend it at employee health. So much for one of my days off.