Blood explosion

How does this happen to me????!!!!!

Now while the blood in the above picture is all on the floor - the explosion I was privy to was all over the floor, side rails, bedding, patient's hands, legs, hospital gown, even in their HAIR!!!

So here's how it all happened....

Settled my confused, ancient, patient who understands NO english to bed.... and went to complete charting as it was 2300hrs and I had a 1/2 hr before my shift was done so off I went.

However, my pt had been restless all evening long and was throwing their legs over the side rails. So since I was nervous that they would fall out of bed, I finished a couple of people's charting and then went to check on this patient. I guess it was intuition that something was going on.

I wish I had a picture that would illistrate the disaster I found. It was SHOCKING! What had happened was that the patient had managed to disconnect this part:

Which was still in the vein - from this part:

because there was this on: a statlock

And while I LOVE statlocks - the confused pt's always make life difficult because the things that are supposed to keep these patient's safe - such as pulling out an IV - they manage to do so anyways. As was the case with my patient.

So because the pt managed to disconnect the extension set from the IV cannula which meant that there was a direct access to the blood supply and away went this pt bleeding EVERYWHERE!!! I was so shocked when I went in there that the first this I did was grab the wrist because there was so much blood everywhere I didn't know WHAT had happened and I just wanted the bleeding to stop! But then I was perplexed because I needed help but I knew that all my colleagues were back at the nurses's station and NO where close enough to call for. It took me about 2 minutes of brainstorming before realizing that I could use the pt's bedside phone and call the nurses station.

But then it just rang and rang! Oh My Goodness!!! At last someone picked up and came to my rescue. I was able to figure out what had happened and reattached a new extension set to stop the bleeding. Then went about cleaning up the blood explosion - which took another 1/2 hr because of the amount of blood. Goodness it was a mess!

Happy ending to me for nurses' week!