Nightmare on Med Error St.

It's official. After 2.5 semester of nursing school, it's finally starting to get to me. I can deal with sleepless nights from school, worrying about clinical the next day or an upcoming test. But now I'm starting to have nightmares. Of the nursing kind.

The first time was last weekend. I dreamt that I had given an antibiotic through an IV, but hadn't done any of my safety checks and just went into the patient's room, hung the IV bag and gave the medicine. To a child. Not that it makes it any better if it's an adult, I'm just terrified of killing children. A short while later (still in my dream), the stupidity of my actions dawned on me and I proceeded to have a meltdown. I had to come over the mental loudspeaker in my dream world and tell myself to wake up because I didn't need that kind of stress. And I was- I was starting to stress out in a real physiological way about something that never actually took place. I woke up with my heart pounding and I had to sit and think for a few seconds to remind myself that what just happened really didn't happen.

And that brings me to last night. Sometime in between midnight and 5am, I had my second medication error nightmare. In this one, I again grabbed an IV antibiotic out of the fridge (we like 'em cold, sometimes) and didn't bother checking names or anything like that and set it up for my patient to receive it over 30 minutes. At about 26 minutes (I can STILL see the IV pump machine screen in my head!) I decided to actually read the IV bag and I realized that not only was it the wrong patient, but my patient was getting twice the potassium that he was supposed to (which is bad, google high potassium levels and you'll know why). And that should've been my first clue- the pharmacy doesn't put potassium in antibiotic bags. But I was dreaming, so that was beyond me at that point. And this time, I took it one step further. In my dream, I tried to calculate how much extra potassium I'd given my patient and some other stuff, before my sub-sub-subconscious saved me and told me to wake up again. Math. While sleeping. Sigh.

So, I'm pretty freaked out. I've never had a med error. You don't get to your third semester of nursing school making med errors. And now twice in one week, I've done it in my dreams. I'm really hoping this isn't some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Needless to say, my instructor made sure I gave meds with her today and not with my nurse.

And on a side note, my mom phoned me from Mt. Rushmore this afternoon. Being the red/white/blue blooded proud American that I am, I promptly asked which four presidents are depicted at Mt. Rushmore, because I have no idea. I have to know the immunization schedule for children, 12 congenital heart defects and about 90 other common childhood conditions for my final on Wednesday- there's no way I have room in my head for the presidents featured on some mountain in South Dakota. And what's sadder- I was only 100% sure with Washington and Lincoln, and I guessed on Roosevelt. She phoned me back minutes after we hung up to tell me it's composed of Washington, Lincoln, Reagan and Bush. I called her a liar. I hope she knows I was kidding.

Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Jefferson. There, now my brain is totally full.