Double Flee A

I saw "along came polly", and it's terrible. Ben Stiller now joins Adam Sandler in having burned me too many times. Sadly, he just isn't funny any more. There wasn't one joke that you couldn't see coming from a mile away. Gross jokes they tried to make like the Farrelly brothers (kingpin, awesome) wound up al Eddie Murphy.

Today a funny thing happened. I had a vial of some cephalosporin antibiotic I can't remember the name of and I reconstituted it with ten mls of water. Pretty normal. Then I did two more. So here I am with the three vials which are ten mls apiece, and I start drawing up the three seven point five ml doses. Seven and a half, ok. Then I started to draw up the remaining two point five so I could move on to the second vial to finish up the dose. But I drew past two point five, past three, past four, and then past five. Shit. The vial's 2 grams, and the concentration's supposed to be two hundred mgs per ml, so there's a problem here. The concentration's off by about a third. I thought we were going to have to throw them out and start over. The guy next to me is a veteran of IV room stuff, though, and he figured out what to do and told me.

The powder takes up 2.5, so the proper recon volume was 7.5 mls water, not 10. Instead of trashing all three, he says I should just grab a fourth vial, dump an already reconned vial into the powder of the fourth, drain everything from all four into a 60 ml syringe, and mix it up. Put all that back in the four containers and when that's done it's up to the appropriate concentration. So I started to do it. It was all going to be just fine. The mishap wouldn't have mattered except that it would have really pissed off the pharmacist who was working. His name is Jim.

Now, I've got to hand it to Jim, he's really trying to be a nice guy. He's just so damn angry all the time it's hard for him. Why is he angry? No one knows, but he has been for thirty years. Jim's short temper is nothing less than legendary. It's like the sun. Each day, it rises. Jim's bald and has really hairy arms, so I think he may just have way too much testosterone. It's the tendency of people who work around him to try to guess why he's the way he is. You really can't put up with him unless you've somehow explained him to yourself.

Jim was not going to like this, but if I did it in a hurry, he wouldn't know. So in my haste, I left positive pressure in one of them and it shot out all over the place. Now the waste from this wasn't that bad. Two or less mls, but the vial got all sticky. No biggie. I had to get that in the vials again before he noticed. So I did, the drugs were right, and I moved on to the next thing, pushing the doses over to be checked. Felix (the guy who figured out how to keep me out of trouble) and I smiled and kept working. Time passed.

Sure enough, it's Jim who goes to check the drugs.

Jim: "Why are there four of these?"
Me: "I accidentally did one too many."
Jim: "What did you use?"
Me: "Water."
Jim: "Why is this vial all sticky?"
Me : "I forgot and left positive pressure in the vial."
Jim: "How much water did you put in?"
Me: "Seven and a half mls."

At this point I got up to answer a page, (it was the lovely Joyce telling me I was awesome) and Jim walked right behind me to check out the proper reconstitution volume for the drug.

Later Felix and I laughed about it. Considering the pains I had gone to to conceal the screw-up in the first place, I wasn't going to admit to it, especially when I was sure it didn't make any difference. I did the drug right, saved the hospital money (sort of) and avoinded an ass-chewing.

I've got a big algebra test tomorrow, and after my brother told me last night that anybody who works hard can be great at math, I feel like I will really be a huge failure if I don't do great. Go, me!

posted by dale @ 9:17 PM