What was your biggest screw up ?

Not really my screw up, but I was there. I was a very young EMT in the late 80s. My partner and I were working a code. It took a while for the medics to get there, so we were on our own for bit. The family was watching our every move and sobbing loudly as we performed the fruitless "CPR and Shock" dance. After we packaged and transported to the hospital, my partner got this awful look on his face.

"Oh hell. I left my jacket and the radio at the house."

Now, if it was just his jacket, we would have left it there. (Remember, this was in the late 80s and we wore really tacky windbreakers.) However, we had just been issued these spankin' new radios and the company would have hung us by our gonads if we lost a radio only a week after getting them.

Soooo... back to the house we went, which was now full of sobbing relatives.

Knock, knock. "Hi, we forgot some stuff here..."

Awkward and uncomfortable.

My partner never lived that down. Every call after that I always asked, "Hey, got the radio?"
 
first ride ever as a basic

tried checking a geriatric patient's bp above an i.v. in her arm...i got some wierd looks and a "v8" smack to the head, lol.
 
Dropped a stretcher with a pt. I pulled it out, but it was a bit too low, so I wanted to raise it up a bit. I thought the little wheels were still on the floor of the ambulance, but apparently not....*CRASH*

Thankfully, a really friendly middle-aged patient, we had been talking for the entire 1.5-hour ride before and hit it off pretty well, he just laughed it off. The funniest thing was how it took him a good 3-4 seconds to realize his stretcher had just collapsed, because he was high on morphine...the 3 of us (including my primary preceptors, OF COURSE, it couldn't have happened in front of anyone else, you know :rolleyes: lol) just stared in horror for the duration of that time.

It's been a few weeks and I still feel nervous whenever I have to unload the stretcher with the patient from the ambulance...:wacko:
 
I've moved a pt from a chair to stretcher only to find out afterwords he had a urinary catheter attached to the other side of the chair. He screamed bloody hell but somehow it stayed in :sad:
 
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