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Why they didn't use Saline which is safe and hardly controlled instead of... tap water?
Since she was stealing drugs I would imagine that it was due to saline being inventory controlled and would have further raised suspicion.
I work as a hospital supervisor. I honestly don't know of any facility where you can't get saline iv flushes. Most nurses have pockets full of them each shift. If you didn't have that for some reason you could get sterile saline and draw it up yourself, also would be easily obtainable.
My only thought here is that the person didn't want to leave the room when administering drugs and so they used tap water as an easily sourced replacement for the drugs they was stealing since there is a sink is every room (at least in most hospital rooms).
The real answer here is that drug addiction overrides rational thought and they either didn't know or didn't care that tap water is not safe at all for iv administration.
We see lots of cases of diversion unfortunately because these drugs are just so damn addictive and there are only so many safe guards you can put in place to protect against it. At the end of the day no matter how many checks there are you will eventually have a clinical staff member drawing up the drugs and administering it. As long as this remains the case you will have people that abuse that weak link in the chain.
The real answer here is that drug addiction overrides rational thought and they either didn't know or didn't care that tap water is not safe at all for iv administration.
That's the most likely answer.
I buy sterile saline all the time. I think they probably just didn’t give a damn.
Imagine the pain those people went through when they didn’t get their pain meds.
Fuck that nurse.
New horror unlocked; medical care professionals injecting saline instead of pain meds. Complain of pain, anesthesiologist concludes I’m either faking or resistant. So either I wither in pain or they up the dosage. Let’s say the latter happens once or twice and then at shift change the new nurse isn’t a druggie piece of shit and gives the adjusted dosage in full and I overdose, maybe die.
There are other, more sanctioned horrors if you’re ever in the position to need meds to deal with indescribable pain in a hospital.
I once had major abdominal surgery and was on a morphine drip. Unfortunately I have a genetic defect that means I don’t metabolise drugs well, so even strong meds don’t work well and I’ve woken under anaesthetia twice.
It turns out that if you push the button on the morphine machine too many times, its software assumes you’re a drug seeker and starts giving you less. So the more you need it to keep the pain relatively tolerable, the less it will give you.
You don’t even have to have that genetic condition to wind up in a hell of the software’s making. I only learned that was the issue after being at a user experience conference where one of the presenters (pretty sure it was Alan Cooper but it may have been Steve Wozniak) talked about his experience with that machine after an accident that motivated him to research why his pain meds were inadequate, and how medical user experience is horribly abysmal.
As far as I know, nothing has been done to address issues like that since.
That shit happens with surprising regularity. This nurse got caught because they uaed tap water and people died from infections.
New horror unlocked; medical care professionals injecting saline instead of pain meds. Complain of pain, anesthesiologist concludes I’m either faking or resistant. So either I wither in pain or they up the dosage. Let’s say the latter happens once or twice and then at shift change the new nurse isn’t a druggie piece of shit and gives the adjusted dosage in full and I overdose, maybe die.
Yes, it is partially this. They didn't use what was on hand because of inventory control, but they didn't care enough to buy some and sneak it into the scenario. This isn't some sort of thought out heist or something. They are most likely an addict and this is a quick easy way to get drugs while being not very likely to make things more suspicious. Users inject with tap water all the time, it is super rare for the tap water to be the reason for infection and other medical complications. So she probably didn't even realize this could be a possibility.
If it's that rare, I think the obvious inference is that she pulled the same shit on a lot more patients than just the 10 who died.
Oh guaranteed. Depending on how long her addiction out paced her income it could be 100s of patients or, maybe, dozens of patients 100s of times.
But you can just walk into any drug store (probably some grocery stores) and buy enough to swap out the amount of fentanyl they are injecting I would imagine (since it's potent stuff). Just someone that clearly didn't think the plan all the way through, and likely has some debt or driving factor clouding their judgement.
I'm willing to bet you can just buy saline. Or make it at home, as long as it is kept sterile.
So that nurse will be charged with 10 counts of murder on top of the federal drug crimes, right? ...Right?
actually, probably yeah
probably something like involuntary manslaughter as opposed to literal premeditated murder, but yes serious jail time is warranted
In my state I think "reckless manslaugher" might be apt:
You caused the death of another person; and
You were aware of and showed a conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death.
It's a nurse. Not a cop.
This really stung in the worst way.
Yes. The nursing profession doesn't fuck around with this kind of shit.
Yes, because then they can avoid any liability for the business as well as avoiding blame for the administrators who are guilty of 8 negligent homicides because they ignored the 8 after the second death that meant there was definitely something more than a freak accident going on
Holy fuck.
This is why we need to provide both careful vhetting and a positive work environment for folks like nurses, teachers, etc. These people literally hold our lives in their hands, the future of our kids, etc. It should be a high bar to get in, then we should treat them with the respect/compensation that their role deserves because you get what you pay for.
Nursing supervisor here. Let me tell you a story just in case you might have been able to sleep tonight. I work in a long-term care facility, and most of our staff of nurses is from a staffing agency, which has the same effect as a union. Normally I'm all for unions, except many of these nurses feel incredibly entitled to work how and whenever they want. If I ask them to go fill a vacancy on a different unit that they don't want to work on, they will just cry oppression, and threaten to leave that very minute, which they are able to do because they come from a staffing agency and not our facility. There is literally no scenario where we can just not have nurses, so we are forced to bend around backwards to let them have whatever they want, come on to shift as late as they want, etc, or we have no staff to run a facility and care for patients. At least in my area, shitty nurses are better than no nurses, and many of them choose to weaponize this fact. I'll just reiterate that I am myself a working registered nurse, and these are the facts that I deal with everyday.
Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses, and I frequently end up on a med cart to fill those vacancies I mentioned. The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
The nursing shortage is really bad you guys.
I know, let’s use temporary nurses that aren’t as qualified: we can pay them less and no benefits. That will increase the number of nurses
"I'll fight through the gates of hell and back for my nurses"*
*Except to advocate that our cheap ass private equity owned facility hire actual full time staff with benefits instead of outsourcing to a temp agency.
Those agency nurses aren't your enemy. They aren't the reason you end up taking an assignment. That's the fault of the corporation that owns you. And in all sincerity, good for those agency nurses demanding the working conditions that they want and refusing to accept whatever the facility wants to push on them.
Sincerely, a hospital nurse having our union election on Jan 10
(And I have stories too, you know. Like my supervisor who tonight simply lied to the overnight sup about our staffing situation and tried to leave two nurses alone to care for NINE patients on our critical care stepdown unit overnight.)
The nursing shortage is at least partially artificial. There is a shortage of nurses who are willing to work in abusive conditions that exploit our legal, moral, and professional obligations to our patients to make their profit. Fight these corporations for safe working conditions and watch how many nurses return to the bedside.
It is alleged that the nurse was attempting to conceal the misuse of the hospital's pain medication supply
What a POS, but at least it was the result of regular ol drug addiction instead of some religious nut job making a "statement" that medications are "unholy and unnatural" or some bullshit.
It unfathomably amazes me that someone intelligent and dedicated enough to get a nursing license was so stupid they didn't know to use something sterilized to replace it with. Drugged up Addict or not.
Oregonian, here. Kinda not surprised this happened in Medford. There are parts of the state that have a serious problem with fentanyl, almost as bad as in the rural south.
Ex-Oregonian here. It's always Medford; before fentanyl, it was meth.
Right? Of course it was Methford.
I really thought you were going to say ‘almost as bad as Yakima’, which would also make sense.
Rogue hospital staff reselling fentanyl to fentheads for $$$? Colour me surprised!
This is nothing compared to the literal meth lab in a Riverside hospital. I want to say it was the late 90s
As awful as diversion is, and as awful as the choice to use tap water was…can we talk about why the tap water is full of pathogenic Pseudomonas?
Tap water is full of stuff that is never harmful for people to drink. Injecting it in your veins, though, is a very very bad idea making me wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can't be THAT stupid
Seriously, couldn't even be bothered to find some saline so these people in agonizing pain didn't also have to die of terrible blood infections?
I feel for all the other responsible medical workers who are already dealing with the most ornary customers in the world. This nurse, if they were aware, and all complicit staff have fucked their colleagues over.
I agree that tap water def shouldn’t go into your veins. I also recently did a six month long study on Pseudomonas, and pathogenic Pseudomonas specifically, and feel like I know enough about this bacterial family to be freaked out that that’s what was in the water and killed the people.
Just because you can injest something safely doesn't mean it's safe to inject. Your stomach acid and enzymes kill many pathogens in low concentrations so the fact that you can't safely inject tap water doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the water.
Additionally I'm sure the water facet used to get the tap water wasn't sterilized either. You wouldn't want to touch a syringe to your water spigot before using it I'm sure, let alone inject the unsterilized water from it.
Water for injections has super strict requirements for a reason.
Toilet water is not allowed. Water from the bowl at the dog park, also out. Voss is a maybe.
We do not for the same reason environments you live in also have Staphylococcus everywhere and it’s impossible to control but assuming you have an average working body and regularly wash your hands before touching things like a toilet handle and then your face you should be pretty safe. Your skin as the largest protective organ and immune system protect you from this. this goes the same for the assumption that you would ingest water as expected and your entire digestive system protects you a lot from what is in water. They do test water but they don’t test it for things you would come into contact when injecting which bypasses a lot of what your body would do already to protect yourself.
This is why some products like netti potties might suggest distilled or boiled water before filling as it’s not a common way to consume water.
The opiate, fentanyl and meth epidemics are eugenics from the top down with how they're laser targeted to certain locales that have been divested from. The healthcare industry is ripe with corruption by design. More for them, less for you, that includes years on your life.
it's not targeted, it's just that drugs seem like a better idea the more miserable you are to begin with... so divested locales have it worse.
also, the poorer you are the better drug dealing seems.