Three Episodes Of Stupidity

A patient was complaining of lung congestion, so the doctor on call was asked to see the patient. He made a quick visit and scribbled an order before leaving the floor. The order said to ambulate the patient. Normally, that would be a good thing to do, but in this case, we will not ambulate him despite what the doctor wrote. The patient is paralyzed from the neck down. If the doctor had shown us the order before leaving the floor, we could have pointed out that minor detail. It's a little sick, but we got some laughs over that.

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Another doctor ordered a setting on a PCA (patient controlled anesthesia) machine that would have been fatal. The nurses were trying to program the machine, but couldn't get the machine to accept the settings. I was asked to come help them. When they told me what they were trying to do, I asked if they were trying to kill the patient. I wasn't being sarcastic. They understood what I meant and answered that no, the patient was young and healthy.

I told them that the dose would likely be fatal, but they insisted that they were just following doctor's orders. I looked at the orders and the decimal point was clearly where they said it was, so the doctor must have been either tired or insane when he wrote it.

The manufacturer of the PCA pump, in a mark of genius, made it impossible to set the machine at such a high setting. Otherwise, the nurses, stupidly, would have carried out the doctor's stupid order and overdosed the patient.

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We have another patient who is going to be staying with us for a while because he has a stupid mother. The patient, who is in his teens had all of the classic signs of appendicitis, so his mom brought him to the ER. The surgeon said that his appendix needed to be removed. The mom refused, so a second surgeon came and said that the appendix needed to come out. The mom refused again. A third surgeon gave the same opinion. The mom finally agreed, the kid was rushed to surgery, but the appendix had already burst. Caught in time, he would have gone home the next day. Now, he will be getting antibiotics for weeks and is one sick kid.

It's a wonder that anyone leaves the hospital alive.