Q: Have you ever made a mistake or been involved in an accident at work? How did you tell your manager?

A: Just the other day, I was involved in an incident that is going to cause me a couple months of headaches. Thankfully, no one was hurt (although maybe my feelings a little).

It was a simple blood transfusion. I have given blood to hundreds of patients before and this time was no different. It was me and another nurse (you need two nurses to make sure you have the right patient and the right blood) and everything was going just fine. That is, until I spiked the blood bag with the tubing and noticed that, lower on the tubing, it was a little twisted. Remember, the spike is in the blood and the transfusion has already begun. This means I had already taken my gloves off. I went to try and fix the twisted part and somehow the spike came out of the blood bag! There was blood everywhere! My first reaction was to make sure the tubing and the blood bag didn’t get contaminated so I grabbed the blood and flipped it upside and screamed for the other nurse that was with me to help. She put gloves on and told me to go and wash my blood-soaked hands. There was blood up to my elbows and blood all over the floor.

I informed my resource nurse and she told me I needed to fill out an employee incident form and then go to the ER for blood work. This happened late in the evening so my boss had already left. I knew in the morning she would have something to say. In the midst of all this, my patient went unresponsive and had an O2 sat of 85% on a venti mask. I had to call a rapid response and sent the patient to the ICU. The hits just kept coming!

After I got everything settled, I went to the ER and they gave me the whole rundown about the blood already being checked for things like HIV and HEP C. I wasn’t really worried, but it was just the fact that I had all that blood all over me. They drew a bunch of labs and sent me back upstairs.

The next day, I was so nervous that my manager was going to yell, but she ended up laughing at me and saying that it happens to the best of us. I couldn’t have been happier. I just something in the mail from employee health saying that they tested the blood and it was negative for everything. But for the next 6 months, I need to get follow-up blood work just to make sure I’m all right.

So what did I learn from all this? I learned that I should wear gloves at all times during a transfusion until the second before I leave the room and to not be so scared of my manager!

Have you had a similar experience? How did you handle it?

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