When I was in nursing school, I never thought about the dangers that lurk in the darkness, the things I
would encounter as a nurse that could change my life forever. On a fateful day in 1998, there was an
event, a needle stick that changed my life forever.
I was worked nights as an oncology nurse at the local hospital in Humble, Texas. I had two small
children at the time, so the night shift appeared to be the best option for me. My shift started at eleven
pm, the majority of my patients were sleeping and I knew which ones could be monitored without
waking them up. One night I received report during shift change from the nurse that was leaving. She
stated the patient in room 303 had an IV running that had a couple of hours before it would be…
I also struggled with myself about why it happened, I wondered was it my
carelessness or was it another person’s disregard for procedures that led to this event. The nurse from
the shift before did things that jeopardized my life. First she failed to give me report that this patient
was HIV and Hepatitis C positive, a very critical fact, but I knew that because I had cared for him all
week. Second she had completely disregarded the policy for using the needless system we had for
administering IV’s, instead she used a sharp needle. Not only that, she had set the drip rate wrong so the
IV finished faster than it should have. I was so angry at the nurse I was seeing red. I called my husband
during the middle of the night to let him know what had happened. He said “I told you not to become a
nurse”, not the support I was looking for.
Things after that were very blurry, I remember going to go to the ER and having baseline labs drawn. The
infectious disease doctor came in to talk to me about the course of treatment and the possibility that I
could have contracted one of the deadly diseases. I was started on a cocktail of prophylactic medicine
and instructed to practice safe sex. The medication regimen that I was given is the same that…
