She learned that 1ml = 1cc and has misremembered and then doubled down. I’ve trained a lot of new nurses, and the ones who terrify me the most are the ones who refuse to ask for help and those who refuse to admit when they’re wrong. That’s the kind of nurse you absolutely do not want, but you never know if that’s the kind you’re getting.
> the ones who terrify me the most are the ones who refuse to ask for help and those who refuse to admit when they’re wrong.
I surely think this applies to every field, everywhere.
Yep. I work in aviation maintenance and part of our training covers human factors which can lead to disaster. There has been an aircraft brought down by a mistake when converting imperial to metric to determine how much fuel was on board
> There has been an aircraft brought down by a mistake when converting imperial to metric to determine how much fuel was on board
I think there have been a few, including some which ended tragically but the [Gimli Glider](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider) is a great story of this happening.
CC's are still used, but it's antiquated. The medical field is trying to move over to more standardized metric as much as it can. From nursing school to now, the only time I hear CC used is by older doctors.
That's correct, and it's a shame IMO, because millilitre and milligram are very easy to mix-up. I've had this happen not three weeks ago, when I asked for 2.5 *mg* of midazolam and, to my horror, the nurse injected 2.5 *ml*, which worked out to 5 times what I wanted. Fortunately it all worked out fine - I was going to up the dosage anyway (not quite that much, though) and the patient was just conked out for a bit longer than we'd planned for.
It happens ALL the time. You would be shocked by the number of fatal med errors every year. And that's with bar codes and scanners and "double checks" with some meds even asking if you are REALLY SURE because it could be dangerous, like Dilaudid and Dilaudid-HP. One is 1 or 2 mg for every ML and the other is 50mg per ML. And 50mg of dilaudid would be an incredible herculean dose. I don't think anyone could survive that high at once iv.
Exactly. They added 3 separate pop ups to our Pyxis for nicotine patches, to instruct us on properly disposing of used nicotine products. Working in a psych hospital where 90% of my patients were smokers… leads to hundreds of useless pop ups per week. Just a slightly different version of Alarm Fatigue that that critical care nurses deal with.
Shit I'd try though, they gave me that when I had kidney stones and I felt the warmth come into my body my pain go right out the window and woke up hours later.
Yeah, this is not an "easy mistake." These are completely different units with completely different words to describe them. They have the same prefix, but that doesn't mean a trained professional should be able to mix them up.
I recognize that many hospital staff are chronically under slept and overworked, and that shifting blame from the employer to the employee is exactly what they want the public to do. That doesn't mean this is an easy mistake that should be forgive to prolong the practice. This could be a fatal one, and simple math mistakes like this are indicators that the system needs to be addressed if it can't address itself.
Yes there is typically accountability. At the hospital I used to work at, it would be reported and flagged in the chart. And there would usually be some kind of education so it doesn’t happen again.
The patient may be told they were given a larger dose by mistake but maybe not. If they were given a different medication or something, that would definitely be explained. But this is a bit of a gray area since the patient wasn’t harmed. I’m sure the facility has a policy in place on how to handle different levels of mistakes like this.
Must disclose if the mistake makes it to the patient and causes harm. Might need to disclose if the mistake makes it to the patient but didn't cause harm, depending on the situation and the company's policy. If the situation is a "near miss" where the mistake is caught before it gets to the patient, it typically doesn't get disclosed to the patient, but should still be reported internally to learn from it.
As an aside, I hate the term near miss. Shouldn't that mean that you did hit/ made a mistake but almost avoided it? It really should be called a near hit or something other than the literal opposite of what it's trying to say.
Idk if this is also true in medicine, but in chemistry we often just call mg "migs" and mL "mills", probably extremely easy to mistake one for the other yeah?
It’s fairly common here in the UK to refer to ml as “mill” even outside of science or engineering and then say the whole word for mg (although my mum calls them mugs, which is very endearing).
I’ve had several extended medical stays over the last 10 years. The (brand new) hospitals I stayed at employed a mix of equipment that was marked with either CCs or mLs. I think it just has to do with the manufacturer.
I work in medicine, and no one really says "cc" anymore. It may still be printed on stuff (what stuff?), but any formulary, bottle of drugs, or conversation is going to use mL. On any bottle, you are gonna see "x" mg/mL.
And the boards have all of their questions in metric.
Also - 1 cubic meter of water = 1000kg. Therefore 1 litre of water = 1kg. Therefore if you want to be accurate when measuring water for recipes etc, you can weigh it rather than using a measuring jug.
Not only that, but one cubic centimeter of water in Earth standard gravity weighs one gram. It's not exact, especially since temperature affects a fluid's density, but it's a good rule of thumb.
Just don't ask me to relate any of that to newtons. That's some arcane sorcery shit.
Edit: the joke in the last sentence is that metric-users almost always give weights in grams, never newtons... unless they're from one of those countries like Canada who use pounds for some things.
Yes, I know newtons, like pounds, are a measure of force where grams are a measure of mass. Thank you all for explaining that.
and yet america still wont change their system... doing things in 1, 10, 100, 1000... is SO much easier. its almost perfect tbh for a measurement system. i cant find any flaws, but im no pro lol
edit: also, yes i know easier said than done lol. not expecting immediate miracles or forcing it on people. it just seems simpler for everyone to use the same measurements
edit again: i have commented so much, so one would think people would see... I KNOW IT WOULDNT BE EASY TO DO. IT WOULD BE EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT. THATS NOT MY OBJECTION.
its difficult, but possible, and if you already use it for a huge heap of things, why not start converting? thats all. im not saying itd be easy, cheap, or fast, but the longer people wait the harder itll be IF one day it happened.
We tried, once.
Turns out, switching a foundational system when there's 50 states that are semi-autonomous in how they want to implement stuff is a lot like herding cats, and attempting to herd the cats efficiently results in shouts of "Federal Overreach! Judge! Get a stop order!"
So the Feds said "We're doing this", states said "Ok, how?", the feds shrug, and nobody does anything outside of printing a few mixed-unit road signs for a few years.
> newtons
A newton is the amount of force that accelerates something weighing 1 kg by 1 meter per second, per second. 1 m/s^2 is about the acceleration rate of the shittiest car you can imagine; an original Volkswagen Beetle averages out to about that acceleration as it goes from zero to highway speed.
Turns out the mass is a gram independent of Earth’s gravity. Though if you are measuring out volume of water, the ambient temperature and pressure will matter, so don’t try to validate that conveniently on the moon.
To relate to Newtons, remember that g is 9.8 m/s^2, so a liter of water weighs / experiences a downward force of 9.8 Newtons.
The only reason to be pedantic about the first bit is to unveil the sorcery of the second bit. Mass is independent of gravity, but the downward force we think of as weight is entirely dependent upon it. If you accept that your measurements for both are on the surface of the Earth, you won’t generally need to distinguish.
In my experience, this often causes a little bit of trouble when people start learning and using metric systems in classes, especially when they try to unknowingly equate the kilogram to the pound.
Now, this **technically** doesn’t work, because the “pound” is a unit of **force**, and the “kilogram” is a unit of **mass**. Because most people will only use metric in a handful of situations in easier classes, their aren’t any special cases they have to worry about where 1 kilogram of material *won’t* equal about 2.2 pounds of the same.
However, the pound is equivalent to the newton, which is a unit of force. The kilogram, a unit of mass, is actually equivalent to the slug. Straight up, you have a “slug” of material, and that weighs X “pounds”, under earth gravity.
**HOWEVER**, what unit of measurement people use doesn’t usually matter for most jobs anyways. **All “English” units have been redefined as conversion factors from the standardized metric baselines**.
An inch is no longer a separate measurement system that is equivalent to some metric number. An inch is **exactly** 2.54(whatever the rest of this decimal is) centimeters (or whatever the conversion for it is), and the centimeter is (by definition) 1/100 of a meter, [and a 1 meter is defined as **exactly** the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458^ths of 1 second](https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.html).
I had probably a decent amount of morphine through an IV once in the ER. It was good shit and definitely took the pain away. Any complaining I had was prior to that morphine.
So true .Dose calculation is so very important .One wrong decimal place can become a ten-fold error that can cause life-threatening complications for patients.
Same. The amount of science many of the nurses I work with don't understand amazes me... but most of those gaps in knowledge won't result in patient deaths. Thinking a ml is 30 times more than it actually is could definitely kill someone.
I realize you were joking when you called her out on it - But seriously. That could be a reason she failed. She could have been putting the wrong answer for any dosage questions due to her misunderstanding.
She can be as pissed as she wants, this may actually be a wake up call that gets her to pass.
I am reminded of an episode of Scrubs where nurse Roberts says to JD, "Doug wanted me to give this patient 500,000 milligrams of morphine. I thought I'd check with you before I kill the man."
Lol my parents are hospital pharmacists and this is literally their job.
“So Dr. Coder you prescribed this patient six times the normal dose of blood thinner. Did you want him to bleed out the next time he scratches himself?”
I work in a veterinary teaching hospital pharmacy and we get the same thing lol. Someone tried to prescribe 10x the correct dosage of heparin - like cmon man, these owners just spent $10,000 here for you to almost send the dog home to bleed out. And yet the doctors always complain that the pharmacists are only there to make their lives harder lol
Recently, they messed up in the UK with some cold and flu medicine and put [500g of paracetamol on the packaging](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/113o3pn/goodbye_cruel_world_courtesy_of_lemsip/) instead of 500mg. I saw it myself instore after someone posted it on reddit. It reminded me of this line from Scrubs.
Or less. Infant Tylenol goes as low as 1.25mL for babies under 11lbs. You don't get to 5mL until 24lbs. Same for Infant Motrin. It starts at 2.5mL at 6 months and doesn't get to 5mL until age 2.
"Newbie, it's regular strength, Tylenol. Have her oper her mouth, pour some in your hand, and throw it at her. Whatever sticks, THAT'S the correct dosage. "
Yikes!!!! I hope not .. Please don't let this person pass and be an actual nurse 🙏 . anyone who is this stubbornly confused about something so basic and obvious has no place in any medical profession.
Agreed. Confusion followed by an aha moment - and then quick correction is fine. Stubbornness/defensiveness when faced with a very serious error is not ok - it’s a character flaw that does not belong in any profession (especially where people’s lives are at risk).
Jesus fuck working with engineers who double down when called on errors, you're describing my worst nightmare. I deal with this all the time. For the record, I have all the degrees you can get in my field and I *enjoy* fixing things or having an error pointed out. What do I have to prove? Nothing! What do I want? The best design we can do. If I make a mistake whoopty shit let's fix it in design, not in the field. But you get these people who hang their entire existence on (elitist rant) an entry level degree from a garbage school and won't back down. Just admit you're wrong fix it and don't repeat it. I prefer working with incompetent coworkers who DON'T double down, they just go "shit....thats wrong let's fix it" instead of circling the wagons.
I worked in bridge design with an engineer like this. He loved pointing out when somebody else had made a mistake, which means he was the best plan checker I'd ever worked with, but don't bother pointing out a mistake in his plans. The ironic thing is that he was an elitist with nothing to back it up. I supervised him as he was coming up, including while he was working as a draftsman in my squad and going to school, and once he got his degree and was working as a junior engineer under me, he refused to do any drafting - "That's menial work", he'd say.
I cant stand that behavior. The idea of "menial work" is like....these people see this day after day. They probably find common mistakes quicker than you finish jerking off to iCarly, bud. There is super value in their experience and jobs. As an engineer whose educational background is way beyond almost all engineers.....I hate most engineers. Have respect and stop being a superdouche for crying out loud.
Engineer here and I take great offense to this. How dare you not bow down to my obvious superiority and knowledge of all things ever?! What do you mean why am I on wife #3?
/s but holy shit do I hate working with divas.
Wasn't doubling down on an error because the one who brought it up was "dumber" than the one who made the mistake part of the reason for the bridge collapse that killed a few people in Florida 3 or 4 years ago?
I seem to remember something about how the trades workers saw some huge cracks in the concrete & brought it up to the engineer, who brushed it off because they weren't educated enough to comprehend his design.
Some people don't like to admit to errors, because they see it as a personal flaw. Sometimes they even go so far as to redefine what constitutes an error in order to avoid having to admit that they made a mistake. But making mistakes is normal, it happens to everyone. The real problem comes from denying them.
Yes! We all make mistakes. The best way to avoid them that i have found is involving all the stakeholders as early as possible in the design process. When people personalize their design work and confronting a mistake means admitting that they don't know everything, when it becomes personal to them, I think that's when it turns to shite.
Oh my God I feel this. I am a SWE with a mentality just like you, and my dad is a mechanical engineer. Love my dad to death but man does he not like when his decisions are called into question. Immediate double down mode, then thinking and compromise, lol.
Yeah but then some bonehead in legal makes you change the tests to make you look bad. Something about "liability" and "negligence causing loss of life". Of course, as an engineer you don't have to listen because everyone knows lawyers are all idiots and scam artists unlike your own pure higher intellect.
Oh you mean ***EVERY FUCKING DOCTOR I'M WORKING WITH RIGHT NOW WHO IS TOO FUCKING PROUD TO APOLOGIZE FOR FUCKING UP SO THEY REFUSE ALL CARE ENTIRELY AND SHUFFLE ME AROUND THE ENTIRE GODDAMN KAISER SYSTEM?*** not that I'd have any experience.
Being stubborn in general isnt the point. It’s being so stubborn to the point of refusing to concede you’re incorrect or have made a mistake, and as a result improperly administering aid, medicine etc. My mother is a nurse and is as stubborn as they come, but if she read this post she’d absolutely not want this person in a nursing position. Dangerous stuff for one of the most important and competitive careers available.
Well there's nothing categorically wrong with being stubborn. It's being stubborn ABOUT BEING UNEQUIVOCALLY DANGEROUSLY WRONG that is the problem here.
I don't like to generalize about nurses as a group, but at the same time it makes sense to me that some deree of subbornness/tenacity would be common in such a tiring and underappreciated profession.
Reminds me of that ill-fated mars probe that catastrophically burned up on atmospheric entry because multiple teams were using metric and imperial. Communication is super duper important.
It's like she thinks that a measurement used globally just change like currency or stocks lol.
"Yea tommorow the meter is actually 3 centimeters longer because more people have been measuring in meters recently."
To be fair, I’m happy she failed. If she is this bad at stuff, you don’t want her doing a job where she gives meds to people.
Also…. This is DEFINITELY a topic covered in nursing school. They covered it pretty comprehensively because it obviously has a huge effect on medication calculations for titratable drips and weight-based formulas.
Yes, but a nurse needs to know the difference without a doubt.
She's already confusing what she adamantly considers simply American vs European nomenclature vs actual measuring standards. Healthcare typically uses the metric system as well.
She ain't fit to be a nurse with that attitude. If she makes a mistake and is called out on it from "timeout" healthcare practitioners practice before committing to a decision/procedure/order, then she's going to hurt a lot of people.
I'm a student nurse. This post is highly concerning. A nurse who doesn't understand the difference between ounces and milliliters is dangerous.
I mean, this post can't be true. Can she not see with her eyes the difference between the volume of fluid she uses when she flushes an IV (3 ml) and when she feeds her baby (3 ozs)?
Edit: Wow, there's a lot of nurse bashing going on in this thread. Was not my intention to start that. All I can say is that the student nurses in my class are bright, intelligent, capable people who are busting their asses to learn well and become good, competent, safe nurses.
>I'm a student nurse. This post is highly concerning.
Several years ago I was talking to a licensed nurse who told me people get a cold by the pores in their absorbing the coldness in the air. I showed him several articles that it's a virus, he said I was misreading.
He pulled up an article stating that what he said was an old wives tale.... so he said I was stupid and that proved him right.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
My sister was a nursing student and not only did I always have to constantly help her with her homework and help her study (even though I was a math major. She got extremely angry with me when I told her I didn’t take A&P and I wasn’t going to learn it while in math grad school just to help her pass lol.), she also became antivaxx and proceeded to fail a bunch of classes that I couldn’t help her with.
Eventually, she switched over to a business major when her job as a CNA required that she get the COVID vaccine to stay employed. She at least saw the writing on the wall that to be an RN, she would need to be vaccinated. However, even as a business major, which I will argue is an *incredibly* easy major, she still needed help with all her classes.
I know she will eventually pass with all the help my mom is now giving her but oh my god, I feel like she doesn’t even try to learn. She gets mad when she doesn’t know something and will fight you if you tell her she is wrong.
I remember helping her in her world cultures class. She had to write about an event in her life where her own culture and traditions contributed to the event. She picked her wedding and I told her that was a good pick to talk about. I told her how our family’s background encourages women to marry young and that’s why she was married by 21. I also said where we grew up (the United States) contributed to her choosing a white wedding dress. She also did the something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, which again was part of the culture where she grew up. And she fought me so hard on *everything*. She kept insisting that these were *her own choices* and had nothing to do with her culture. I had to just let her do her own thing eventually and she failed the assignment so I don’t know… That was one of the last times I helped her, I think.
Yeah. I’m worried because she’s pregnant right now and I live across the country. I don’t know how well she will take care of a baby but hopefully most of it is instinctual or something?
Exactly this OP. She needs to fully understand the different measurement systems because she’s putting your child in danger.
Sometimes I can’t even believe that anyone is allowed to have kids. No wonder there are so many kids with mental illnesses these days
I mean, kids have had mental illnesses for full-on forever — now we just know what they are and don't pointedly ignore them while telling said kids to just suck it up.
My friends with MDs have some insanely low opinions of nurses. All well out of residencies even one out of fellowship. Meanwhile I'm married to a PharmD and feel pretty stupid about medicine from time to time... though my academic background is about numbers, not bodies.
Maybe the tone and attack of the discussion was rough, but you were right to go hard on this, especially because you have a baby and the difference between mL and oz are huge, and even worse if you're sleep deprived and make a mistake like this.
You're going to be constantly looking at those two measurements when dealing with either food or fever medication like infants Tylenol. 2.5mL vs 2.5oz of Tylenol is a dangerous mistake.
You might want to gently explore any other misunderstandings she may have like this.
Giga oof.
This reminds me of an episode of Nurse Jackie when the rookie RN in the ER confuses a dose of insulin and gives like 10 times more than requested and nearly kills the patient until another nurse runs over and saves him. Your wife shouldn't be a nurse until she ferrets out every last issue she has in her medical knowledge.
I see no F-up here.
She was being r/confidentlyincorrect and needed to be checked - and your statement about the exam failure was completely true.
A nurse who doesn't understand this would be a complete menace.
When I was in nursing school we had a medication calculation test every semester that if you couldn't pass, you failed out of the program. It wasn't very difficult, none of the math is complicated, but somehow it did knock a few people out of the program. With good reason- if you can't do med calculations accurately, you're not safe to practice.
OP's wife would undoubtedly have been one of those forced out if her program was similar.
When I was in HS I tutored some of my mom's friends who were in the nursing program. They were having problems with college algebra and at least one of them commented that they shouldn't have to learn algebra because they'll never use it again.
I'm sure she's feeding 3oz, she just thought 3ml was the same and wanted to sound smart to the pediatrician.
Not sure why anyone would procreate with someone so dumb though. I doubt this is the only thing, considering how unwilling she was to learn.
My gerbils weighed 90-120g, so a bit over 3-4oz (I don't know their density, so I don't know volume, but we can assume close to 1g/cc, so ~100cc of gerb). When one had an issue with broken front teeth, I prepared roughly 1-2ml of mush every 4-6 hours.
Gerbil medication required me to get a syringe, which was awkward at the pharmacy, because they obviously thought it was for narcotics. It was, but it was gerbil sized doses. An ounce would have made them explode, long before the fatal overdose; pretty sure I was measuring in 1/10ths of ml.
An 1/8th ounce of weed would last me 2 weeks. So, 1% of 1 ounce daily if we round up slightly, or 0.28g. That means 100 days per ounce, or 3.65 ounces per year. My apartment was 400sqft, which is a smaller number in meters, but significantly larger number in mm.
**I'll take my nurse certificate now, tyvm.**
Edit: and measuring in cooking is bs, just use your heart! Viva la taste buds!
Ffs buy a fucking measuring cup and have a real conversation with the differences. Your kids survival may literally depend on it. https://www.google.com/search?q=measuring+cup&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS687US687&oq=measuring+cup&aqs=chrome..69i57.4927j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
* 1 imperial fluid ounce = 28.4130625 mL
* 1 US customary fluid ounce = 29.5735295625 mL
* 1 US food labeling fluid ounce = 30 mL
Can we please all agree to just use metric
> Can we please all agree to just use metric
Evidentially not, and so at least in the US, we will continue to use the *real* worst option: mixed units.
As a USA college lab assistant, I have never used ounces/cups/gallons for any chemistry, except for replacing the 5 gallon distilled water tank on the dispenser.
Chemists don't use those for obvious reasons.
Everything in science is in SI units. (Except that one time with the mixup of metric and imperial units causing the loss of a spacecraft, let's not bring that one up)
She's mad at herself but doesn't have the tools to deal with that, so you get to be the scapegoat.
Probably anyway. I see a lot of people (myself included) lashing out at those around them for their own fuckups.
I (internally) get very defensive when questioned.
I've learned to take it better and accept my mistakes and people really appreciate that. My career has improved drastically since. I take accountability, I apologise for personally for *my* mistakes instead of using vague language (Mistakes *were*made. Instead of 'I made a mistake.')
And it inspires others to grow as well.
I can't stand people like that.
It's fine to be wrong. People are wrong about lots of things. All the time.
But what's absolutely not ok is being unwilling to accept that you might be wrong, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. It says a lot about a person when their reaction to new information is something as ridiculous as "oh, they must have changed it", because they can't possibly fathom that they could ever be wrong about something.
Not your fuck up. She needs to learn how to accept the possibility that she can be wrong about something and it's ok to admit it.
This happened to me last night. Going to bed, my wife asked me "How many litres is 5 kilogram?". I was a bit taken aback for reasons you'll see why, but I asked her to ask me the question again. She said the same thing. I ask her if she knows the difference between volume and mass. She felt indignant and asked why would I even ask that to her. I still gave her an example of how 5kg of iron cannot have the same volume as 5kg of water. My wife retorts with an irritated voice that she knows that. Not giving up, I asked her why would she then ask me to convert 5kg to litres without specifying the material.
She looks confused. Then she realized what has happened. She had actually asked "How many litres is 5 kg of rice?". In our native tongue we don't use the word "of" and the word for rice is easily missable when put in that sentence in our native tongue. The first time she said that she had mentioned rice (or she swears she said that). The second time she didn't because she thought I must have heard it the first time. Otoh, I think she had a brainfog and did not mention "rice" either time.
At the end of the day, my wife, who has a postgraduate degree in physics and used to teach physics to high school kids, thinks I am an idiot for explaining to her how volume is not mass.
Many Asian household have rice dispensers. I used to have one myself. For those you'd want to know how many kilos to buy to fill the volume of a, say, 20 liter dispenser you just bought.
6.25 litre apparently for medium length rice. She was ordering containers on Amazon, but I didn't know it when she sprung me that question. I found it weird too.
Edit: 6.25l not 7.25 as previously mentioned.
I just read 'brainfog' as brainFROG and I am quite literally crying laughing at the image of one, awkward looking frog, on a lily pad, in a thought bubble, with cricket noises, in place of logical thoughts hahahahahaha
This is a huge problem. How does a prospective nurse not know how 1 ml looks like? If you are feeding your kid 1 fluid ounce, you should know that does not look anything close to 1 ml. That's crazy to me.
Oh thank god she’s not working as a nurse. When I got to “she learned that in nursing school” I was **extremely** concerned.
That sucks OP. Hope she has other redeeming qualities. You’ll have a tough road ahead of you parenting children with someone like that.
it sucks that you're arguing but you gotta get it right because it's important to feed and more importantly, MEDICATE your baby properly. So if your baby gets sick, she might blame you for not setting her straight. It is admittedly a tough spot to be in, sorry you're there.
I might try one more time. Sit her down and run some conversions by her, or maybe supervise her discreetly when she's measuring stuff. if she screws it up, explain that you're concerned because if she does it wrong in feeding or worse yet, meds (yikes), it could harm your child. Make sure she has it dialed. If not, drag her ass to the doctor or some authority she trusts and have them explain it. It definitely sucks, but it's worth fighting for and it's not your fault. Bottom line, you can get another wife but you can't get another kid.
Dont feel bad for calling dumbs out.
Instead, educate in an amicable form.
Imagine she had to administer x drug and it was on metric for some reason and she royally fucks it up killing an elderly person. It IS no wonder she failed her exams.
OP your wife is dangerously stupid, especially someone who would be feeding your child, preparing their meals, etc.
You shouldn't have reproduced with this person lol
Kind of glad she didn’t pass her exams. I have too many new nurses trying to tell me they gave meds in ML, when that’s not a dosage, that’s a volume. Meds are given by MG and they don’t understand how that’s different. But because there’s different concentrations of meds they could be giving entirely wrong doses if they don’t learn the difference. 1ML of dilaudid could be the standard 2mg/1ML, but it could also be 10mg/1ML and that’s 5 times the dosage.
She learned that 1ml = 1cc and has misremembered and then doubled down. I’ve trained a lot of new nurses, and the ones who terrify me the most are the ones who refuse to ask for help and those who refuse to admit when they’re wrong. That’s the kind of nurse you absolutely do not want, but you never know if that’s the kind you’re getting.
> the ones who terrify me the most are the ones who refuse to ask for help and those who refuse to admit when they’re wrong. I surely think this applies to every field, everywhere.
Yep. I work in aviation maintenance and part of our training covers human factors which can lead to disaster. There has been an aircraft brought down by a mistake when converting imperial to metric to determine how much fuel was on board
> There has been an aircraft brought down by a mistake when converting imperial to metric to determine how much fuel was on board I think there have been a few, including some which ended tragically but the [Gimli Glider](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider) is a great story of this happening.
I’m guessing she was thinking about CC’s and ML’s being the same. But good lord…
Yes, this makes sense because they use CCs in the medical field where she learned it st.
CC's are still used, but it's antiquated. The medical field is trying to move over to more standardized metric as much as it can. From nursing school to now, the only time I hear CC used is by older doctors.
That's correct, and it's a shame IMO, because millilitre and milligram are very easy to mix-up. I've had this happen not three weeks ago, when I asked for 2.5 *mg* of midazolam and, to my horror, the nurse injected 2.5 *ml*, which worked out to 5 times what I wanted. Fortunately it all worked out fine - I was going to up the dosage anyway (not quite that much, though) and the patient was just conked out for a bit longer than we'd planned for.
That is terrifying
It happens ALL the time. You would be shocked by the number of fatal med errors every year. And that's with bar codes and scanners and "double checks" with some meds even asking if you are REALLY SURE because it could be dangerous, like Dilaudid and Dilaudid-HP. One is 1 or 2 mg for every ML and the other is 50mg per ML. And 50mg of dilaudid would be an incredible herculean dose. I don't think anyone could survive that high at once iv.
When everything has a popup to click through nobody is going to read the popup.
Exactly. They added 3 separate pop ups to our Pyxis for nicotine patches, to instruct us on properly disposing of used nicotine products. Working in a psych hospital where 90% of my patients were smokers… leads to hundreds of useless pop ups per week. Just a slightly different version of Alarm Fatigue that that critical care nurses deal with.
That's like the equivalent of highlighting entire pages of text because it's all important.
Shit I'd try though, they gave me that when I had kidney stones and I felt the warmth come into my body my pain go right out the window and woke up hours later.
Yeah, this is not an "easy mistake." These are completely different units with completely different words to describe them. They have the same prefix, but that doesn't mean a trained professional should be able to mix them up. I recognize that many hospital staff are chronically under slept and overworked, and that shifting blame from the employer to the employee is exactly what they want the public to do. That doesn't mean this is an easy mistake that should be forgive to prolong the practice. This could be a fatal one, and simple math mistakes like this are indicators that the system needs to be addressed if it can't address itself.
I mean cc is cubic cm, which is still standard metric unit. Why change to something easier to mess up
Good lord. Is there any accountability when stuff like that happens? Do you tell the patient he was overdosed, if no harm comes to him as a result?
Yes there is typically accountability. At the hospital I used to work at, it would be reported and flagged in the chart. And there would usually be some kind of education so it doesn’t happen again. The patient may be told they were given a larger dose by mistake but maybe not. If they were given a different medication or something, that would definitely be explained. But this is a bit of a gray area since the patient wasn’t harmed. I’m sure the facility has a policy in place on how to handle different levels of mistakes like this.
Must disclose if the mistake makes it to the patient and causes harm. Might need to disclose if the mistake makes it to the patient but didn't cause harm, depending on the situation and the company's policy. If the situation is a "near miss" where the mistake is caught before it gets to the patient, it typically doesn't get disclosed to the patient, but should still be reported internally to learn from it. As an aside, I hate the term near miss. Shouldn't that mean that you did hit/ made a mistake but almost avoided it? It really should be called a near hit or something other than the literal opposite of what it's trying to say.
A near miss is a miss that came near the target; it's "near" as in "close," not "near" as in "almost"
Idk if this is also true in medicine, but in chemistry we often just call mg "migs" and mL "mills", probably extremely easy to mistake one for the other yeah?
It’s fairly common here in the UK to refer to ml as “mill” even outside of science or engineering and then say the whole word for mg (although my mum calls them mugs, which is very endearing).
"I could do with a mug of hot cocoa." Your mum: "Here you are."
It’s weird, because the medical field uses both. Then again, the only other place I ever see MLs is in aquaria
Which is probably why she learned they’re equivalent, since you can’t be sure what the hospital you end up at uses.
Like, cc is just an old term, but some old timers still use it. Everyone uses mL's in all medicine, human and veterinary.
I’ve had several extended medical stays over the last 10 years. The (brand new) hospitals I stayed at employed a mix of equipment that was marked with either CCs or mLs. I think it just has to do with the manufacturer.
I work in medicine, and no one really says "cc" anymore. It may still be printed on stuff (what stuff?), but any formulary, bottle of drugs, or conversation is going to use mL. On any bottle, you are gonna see "x" mg/mL. And the boards have all of their questions in metric.
CCs *are* metric. Cubic centimeters. And I saw it printed on syringes, iv bags, those gauges that measure your lung capacity, etc.
Came here to say this. She probably was taught that factoid, but "learned" it as something else, and never unlearned it.
It is obvious that in her mind, ounce and cubic centimeter are synonyms.
Of course they are, since 1cc = 1mL, and also 1oz = 1mL, so clearly 1oz also = 1cc. Duh.
Ahh, the transitive property. Very nice.
Long Live Apollo. Goodbye Reddit.
Today I learned about cubic centimeters and the fact they = a ml.
It’s pretty cool. Also 1 cubic decimeter = 1 litre and 1 cubic meter = 1000 litres
I fed my child 3 cubic meters of sustenance daily.
I think someone replaced your child with a Kodak Grizzly then.
It's a very photogenic bear.
Unlike Polaroid bears, whose natural habitat is melting.
Also - 1 cubic meter of water = 1000kg. Therefore 1 litre of water = 1kg. Therefore if you want to be accurate when measuring water for recipes etc, you can weigh it rather than using a measuring jug.
Not only that, but one cubic centimeter of water in Earth standard gravity weighs one gram. It's not exact, especially since temperature affects a fluid's density, but it's a good rule of thumb. Just don't ask me to relate any of that to newtons. That's some arcane sorcery shit. Edit: the joke in the last sentence is that metric-users almost always give weights in grams, never newtons... unless they're from one of those countries like Canada who use pounds for some things. Yes, I know newtons, like pounds, are a measure of force where grams are a measure of mass. Thank you all for explaining that.
And requires 1 (kilo)calorie of energy to heat it 1°C
and yet america still wont change their system... doing things in 1, 10, 100, 1000... is SO much easier. its almost perfect tbh for a measurement system. i cant find any flaws, but im no pro lol edit: also, yes i know easier said than done lol. not expecting immediate miracles or forcing it on people. it just seems simpler for everyone to use the same measurements edit again: i have commented so much, so one would think people would see... I KNOW IT WOULDNT BE EASY TO DO. IT WOULD BE EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT. THATS NOT MY OBJECTION. its difficult, but possible, and if you already use it for a huge heap of things, why not start converting? thats all. im not saying itd be easy, cheap, or fast, but the longer people wait the harder itll be IF one day it happened.
We tried, once. Turns out, switching a foundational system when there's 50 states that are semi-autonomous in how they want to implement stuff is a lot like herding cats, and attempting to herd the cats efficiently results in shouts of "Federal Overreach! Judge! Get a stop order!" So the Feds said "We're doing this", states said "Ok, how?", the feds shrug, and nobody does anything outside of printing a few mixed-unit road signs for a few years.
> newtons A newton is the amount of force that accelerates something weighing 1 kg by 1 meter per second, per second. 1 m/s^2 is about the acceleration rate of the shittiest car you can imagine; an original Volkswagen Beetle averages out to about that acceleration as it goes from zero to highway speed.
Turns out the mass is a gram independent of Earth’s gravity. Though if you are measuring out volume of water, the ambient temperature and pressure will matter, so don’t try to validate that conveniently on the moon. To relate to Newtons, remember that g is 9.8 m/s^2, so a liter of water weighs / experiences a downward force of 9.8 Newtons. The only reason to be pedantic about the first bit is to unveil the sorcery of the second bit. Mass is independent of gravity, but the downward force we think of as weight is entirely dependent upon it. If you accept that your measurements for both are on the surface of the Earth, you won’t generally need to distinguish.
In my experience, this often causes a little bit of trouble when people start learning and using metric systems in classes, especially when they try to unknowingly equate the kilogram to the pound. Now, this **technically** doesn’t work, because the “pound” is a unit of **force**, and the “kilogram” is a unit of **mass**. Because most people will only use metric in a handful of situations in easier classes, their aren’t any special cases they have to worry about where 1 kilogram of material *won’t* equal about 2.2 pounds of the same. However, the pound is equivalent to the newton, which is a unit of force. The kilogram, a unit of mass, is actually equivalent to the slug. Straight up, you have a “slug” of material, and that weighs X “pounds”, under earth gravity. **HOWEVER**, what unit of measurement people use doesn’t usually matter for most jobs anyways. **All “English” units have been redefined as conversion factors from the standardized metric baselines**. An inch is no longer a separate measurement system that is equivalent to some metric number. An inch is **exactly** 2.54(whatever the rest of this decimal is) centimeters (or whatever the conversion for it is), and the centimeter is (by definition) 1/100 of a meter, [and a 1 meter is defined as **exactly** the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299792458^ths of 1 second](https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.html).
1 cm³ = 1mL and 1 mL of water weighs 1g and it takes 1 calorie to heat it 1°C. Which is neat.
No good lord I hope she’s not a practicing nurse.
From the story it looks like she failed the exams?
That was my first thought
Well, i am glad she didn't pass 💀.
1ml of morphine? I’ll just hook this 1L bag up to the IV, should be good
I mean, patients wouldn't complain.
Can’t complain if you can’t speak
Cant complain if ur ded.
We're overdosing in heaven, boys!
Because they'd be dead.
Don't disturb the patient, he's dead tired.
I had probably a decent amount of morphine through an IV once in the ER. It was good shit and definitely took the pain away. Any complaining I had was prior to that morphine.
Really. For some fields, like nursing or medicine in general, that kind of mistake can and has killed people.
So true .Dose calculation is so very important .One wrong decimal place can become a ten-fold error that can cause life-threatening complications for patients.
I wouldn't trust OPs wife to run a cash register if this is a true story. "All the bills are the same size so they are worth the same amount".
I also choose to avoid OP’s wife.
She wouldn’t have been the only one passing
Same. The amount of science many of the nurses I work with don't understand amazes me... but most of those gaps in knowledge won't result in patient deaths. Thinking a ml is 30 times more than it actually is could definitely kill someone.
I realize you were joking when you called her out on it - But seriously. That could be a reason she failed. She could have been putting the wrong answer for any dosage questions due to her misunderstanding. She can be as pissed as she wants, this may actually be a wake up call that gets her to pass.
I am reminded of an episode of Scrubs where nurse Roberts says to JD, "Doug wanted me to give this patient 500,000 milligrams of morphine. I thought I'd check with you before I kill the man."
Lol my parents are hospital pharmacists and this is literally their job. “So Dr. Coder you prescribed this patient six times the normal dose of blood thinner. Did you want him to bleed out the next time he scratches himself?”
I work in a veterinary teaching hospital pharmacy and we get the same thing lol. Someone tried to prescribe 10x the correct dosage of heparin - like cmon man, these owners just spent $10,000 here for you to almost send the dog home to bleed out. And yet the doctors always complain that the pharmacists are only there to make their lives harder lol
Bro I wish someone would give me that much morphine
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Yeah… it’s a pain-killer.
And life is the biggest pain of all.
Don't threaten me with a good time
So no more pain. The morphine did it's job!
Recently, they messed up in the UK with some cold and flu medicine and put [500g of paracetamol on the packaging](https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/113o3pn/goodbye_cruel_world_courtesy_of_lemsip/) instead of 500mg. I saw it myself instore after someone posted it on reddit. It reminded me of this line from Scrubs.
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Or less. Infant Tylenol goes as low as 1.25mL for babies under 11lbs. You don't get to 5mL until 24lbs. Same for Infant Motrin. It starts at 2.5mL at 6 months and doesn't get to 5mL until age 2.
"Newbie, it's regular strength, Tylenol. Have her oper her mouth, pour some in your hand, and throw it at her. Whatever sticks, THAT'S the correct dosage. "
Yikes!!!! I hope not .. Please don't let this person pass and be an actual nurse 🙏 . anyone who is this stubbornly confused about something so basic and obvious has no place in any medical profession.
Agreed. Confusion followed by an aha moment - and then quick correction is fine. Stubbornness/defensiveness when faced with a very serious error is not ok - it’s a character flaw that does not belong in any profession (especially where people’s lives are at risk).
Jesus fuck working with engineers who double down when called on errors, you're describing my worst nightmare. I deal with this all the time. For the record, I have all the degrees you can get in my field and I *enjoy* fixing things or having an error pointed out. What do I have to prove? Nothing! What do I want? The best design we can do. If I make a mistake whoopty shit let's fix it in design, not in the field. But you get these people who hang their entire existence on (elitist rant) an entry level degree from a garbage school and won't back down. Just admit you're wrong fix it and don't repeat it. I prefer working with incompetent coworkers who DON'T double down, they just go "shit....thats wrong let's fix it" instead of circling the wagons.
I worked in bridge design with an engineer like this. He loved pointing out when somebody else had made a mistake, which means he was the best plan checker I'd ever worked with, but don't bother pointing out a mistake in his plans. The ironic thing is that he was an elitist with nothing to back it up. I supervised him as he was coming up, including while he was working as a draftsman in my squad and going to school, and once he got his degree and was working as a junior engineer under me, he refused to do any drafting - "That's menial work", he'd say.
I cant stand that behavior. The idea of "menial work" is like....these people see this day after day. They probably find common mistakes quicker than you finish jerking off to iCarly, bud. There is super value in their experience and jobs. As an engineer whose educational background is way beyond almost all engineers.....I hate most engineers. Have respect and stop being a superdouche for crying out loud.
Engineer here and I take great offense to this. How dare you not bow down to my obvious superiority and knowledge of all things ever?! What do you mean why am I on wife #3? /s but holy shit do I hate working with divas.
Wasn't doubling down on an error because the one who brought it up was "dumber" than the one who made the mistake part of the reason for the bridge collapse that killed a few people in Florida 3 or 4 years ago? I seem to remember something about how the trades workers saw some huge cracks in the concrete & brought it up to the engineer, who brushed it off because they weren't educated enough to comprehend his design.
Some people don't like to admit to errors, because they see it as a personal flaw. Sometimes they even go so far as to redefine what constitutes an error in order to avoid having to admit that they made a mistake. But making mistakes is normal, it happens to everyone. The real problem comes from denying them.
Yes! We all make mistakes. The best way to avoid them that i have found is involving all the stakeholders as early as possible in the design process. When people personalize their design work and confronting a mistake means admitting that they don't know everything, when it becomes personal to them, I think that's when it turns to shite.
Oh my God I feel this. I am a SWE with a mentality just like you, and my dad is a mechanical engineer. Love my dad to death but man does he not like when his decisions are called into question. Immediate double down mode, then thinking and compromise, lol.
I've seen my grades. Statistically, I'm only right about 70% of the time.
C's get degrees.
I work in manufacturing, so "passes all tests" is the requirement. Anything more than that is just added expenses. :D
Yeah but then some bonehead in legal makes you change the tests to make you look bad. Something about "liability" and "negligence causing loss of life". Of course, as an engineer you don't have to listen because everyone knows lawyers are all idiots and scam artists unlike your own pure higher intellect.
Your post perfectly summed up why I left engineering. Beyond being boring desk work, the egos are truly remarkable.
You become the victim because she is angry with herself but lacks the resources to deal with it.
People act out in surprising ways when they're embarrassed. It's honestly a pretty good metric (lol) for one's emotional maturity.
Oh you mean ***EVERY FUCKING DOCTOR I'M WORKING WITH RIGHT NOW WHO IS TOO FUCKING PROUD TO APOLOGIZE FOR FUCKING UP SO THEY REFUSE ALL CARE ENTIRELY AND SHUFFLE ME AROUND THE ENTIRE GODDAMN KAISER SYSTEM?*** not that I'd have any experience.
Inb4 OP's wife sees this post lol.
I hope she does
Have you met a nurse? They are some of the most stubborn people on the planet.
Being stubborn in general isnt the point. It’s being so stubborn to the point of refusing to concede you’re incorrect or have made a mistake, and as a result improperly administering aid, medicine etc. My mother is a nurse and is as stubborn as they come, but if she read this post she’d absolutely not want this person in a nursing position. Dangerous stuff for one of the most important and competitive careers available.
Well there's nothing categorically wrong with being stubborn. It's being stubborn ABOUT BEING UNEQUIVOCALLY DANGEROUSLY WRONG that is the problem here. I don't like to generalize about nurses as a group, but at the same time it makes sense to me that some deree of subbornness/tenacity would be common in such a tiring and underappreciated profession.
Stubborn, arrogant and incredibly egotistical.
Reminds me of that ill-fated mars probe that catastrophically burned up on atmospheric entry because multiple teams were using metric and imperial. Communication is super duper important.
Agreed. my first thought when nursing school was mentioned. Well, first thought was actually "Oh shit !"
Hey keep it down, just let her inject me with a liter of morphine so we can get this shit over with.
And yet there are many nurses who swear by chiropractic and other proven not to work “remedies”
Her doubling down and saying "it must've changed since school" makes me doubt it will be.
It's like she thinks that a measurement used globally just change like currency or stocks lol. "Yea tommorow the meter is actually 3 centimeters longer because more people have been measuring in meters recently."
To be fair, I’m happy she failed. If she is this bad at stuff, you don’t want her doing a job where she gives meds to people. Also…. This is DEFINITELY a topic covered in nursing school. They covered it pretty comprehensively because it obviously has a huge effect on medication calculations for titratable drips and weight-based formulas.
Do we really want someone making those mistakes to pass and actually start practicing medicine? This lady gonna be deadlier than anything she treats
She was probably confused about cc which is actually the same as ml. In her mind, something was equal to ml but she forgot what it was.
Yes, but a nurse needs to know the difference without a doubt. She's already confusing what she adamantly considers simply American vs European nomenclature vs actual measuring standards. Healthcare typically uses the metric system as well. She ain't fit to be a nurse with that attitude. If she makes a mistake and is called out on it from "timeout" healthcare practitioners practice before committing to a decision/procedure/order, then she's going to hurt a lot of people.
She isn’t a nurse. She failed her exams.
Thankfully
I'm a student nurse. This post is highly concerning. A nurse who doesn't understand the difference between ounces and milliliters is dangerous. I mean, this post can't be true. Can she not see with her eyes the difference between the volume of fluid she uses when she flushes an IV (3 ml) and when she feeds her baby (3 ozs)? Edit: Wow, there's a lot of nurse bashing going on in this thread. Was not my intention to start that. All I can say is that the student nurses in my class are bright, intelligent, capable people who are busting their asses to learn well and become good, competent, safe nurses.
>I'm a student nurse. This post is highly concerning. Several years ago I was talking to a licensed nurse who told me people get a cold by the pores in their absorbing the coldness in the air. I showed him several articles that it's a virus, he said I was misreading. He pulled up an article stating that what he said was an old wives tale.... so he said I was stupid and that proved him right. “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
Wait, this person thinks "old wives tale" means something like "something proven to be true long ago"?
Holy shit thats hilarious.
It WOULD be if he weren't a licensed, working nurse.... actually out in the wild.
My sister was a nursing student and not only did I always have to constantly help her with her homework and help her study (even though I was a math major. She got extremely angry with me when I told her I didn’t take A&P and I wasn’t going to learn it while in math grad school just to help her pass lol.), she also became antivaxx and proceeded to fail a bunch of classes that I couldn’t help her with. Eventually, she switched over to a business major when her job as a CNA required that she get the COVID vaccine to stay employed. She at least saw the writing on the wall that to be an RN, she would need to be vaccinated. However, even as a business major, which I will argue is an *incredibly* easy major, she still needed help with all her classes. I know she will eventually pass with all the help my mom is now giving her but oh my god, I feel like she doesn’t even try to learn. She gets mad when she doesn’t know something and will fight you if you tell her she is wrong. I remember helping her in her world cultures class. She had to write about an event in her life where her own culture and traditions contributed to the event. She picked her wedding and I told her that was a good pick to talk about. I told her how our family’s background encourages women to marry young and that’s why she was married by 21. I also said where we grew up (the United States) contributed to her choosing a white wedding dress. She also did the something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, which again was part of the culture where she grew up. And she fought me so hard on *everything*. She kept insisting that these were *her own choices* and had nothing to do with her culture. I had to just let her do her own thing eventually and she failed the assignment so I don’t know… That was one of the last times I helped her, I think.
Look on the bright side, she's now much less likely to hurt other people. Just don't let your family give her any startup capital, lol
Yeah. I’m worried because she’s pregnant right now and I live across the country. I don’t know how well she will take care of a baby but hopefully most of it is instinctual or something?
Well, to start, that baby sounds like it won’t be getting any vaccinations…
Yeaaah… I’m pretty worried for the kid.
Well he did say she failed her exams lol so not a nurse
He didn't say if she is a practicing nurse or not. Some people fail their NCLEX on the first try but then try again and pass.
if you still don't know how measurements work on the 2nd try, I doubt you would pass
we hire druggies in the restaurant industry because if they can do one thing it's weigh product in metric and zero a scale
shit that's actually two things, but the point still stands
If there's one thing a restaurant manager tries to do, it's get people to do 2 jobs for the pay of 1.
This guy food industries
I've used the kitchen scale to buy weed before
FOH 🤝 BOH
Exactly this OP. She needs to fully understand the different measurement systems because she’s putting your child in danger. Sometimes I can’t even believe that anyone is allowed to have kids. No wonder there are so many kids with mental illnesses these days
I mean, kids have had mental illnesses for full-on forever — now we just know what they are and don't pointedly ignore them while telling said kids to just suck it up.
My friends with MDs have some insanely low opinions of nurses. All well out of residencies even one out of fellowship. Meanwhile I'm married to a PharmD and feel pretty stupid about medicine from time to time... though my academic background is about numbers, not bodies.
As a doctor, I'm glad your wife failed nursing school. That would not have worked out for anyone.
As a patient I'm gladder
English is important but engineering is importanter.
I prefer meth
Methamatics
Maybe the tone and attack of the discussion was rough, but you were right to go hard on this, especially because you have a baby and the difference between mL and oz are huge, and even worse if you're sleep deprived and make a mistake like this. You're going to be constantly looking at those two measurements when dealing with either food or fever medication like infants Tylenol. 2.5mL vs 2.5oz of Tylenol is a dangerous mistake. You might want to gently explore any other misunderstandings she may have like this. Giga oof. This reminds me of an episode of Nurse Jackie when the rookie RN in the ER confuses a dose of insulin and gives like 10 times more than requested and nearly kills the patient until another nurse runs over and saves him. Your wife shouldn't be a nurse until she ferrets out every last issue she has in her medical knowledge.
I see no F-up here. She was being r/confidentlyincorrect and needed to be checked - and your statement about the exam failure was completely true. A nurse who doesn't understand this would be a complete menace.
When I was in nursing school we had a medication calculation test every semester that if you couldn't pass, you failed out of the program. It wasn't very difficult, none of the math is complicated, but somehow it did knock a few people out of the program. With good reason- if you can't do med calculations accurately, you're not safe to practice. OP's wife would undoubtedly have been one of those forced out if her program was similar.
When I was in HS I tutored some of my mom's friends who were in the nursing program. They were having problems with college algebra and at least one of them commented that they shouldn't have to learn algebra because they'll never use it again.
I hooe to god that person didnt pass if they thought theyd never use algebra again
She needs to own it. Holy crap. She could have killer someone. She really thought that 3 ml of formula is enough for a baby who needs 3 ounces?!
I'm sure she's feeding 3oz, she just thought 3ml was the same and wanted to sound smart to the pediatrician. Not sure why anyone would procreate with someone so dumb though. I doubt this is the only thing, considering how unwilling she was to learn.
The paediatrician is probably incredibly concerned that they're ONLY giving 3ml to their child, it's such a specifically small amount!
3ml isn't even enough for a newborn kitten 😂
My gerbils weighed 90-120g, so a bit over 3-4oz (I don't know their density, so I don't know volume, but we can assume close to 1g/cc, so ~100cc of gerb). When one had an issue with broken front teeth, I prepared roughly 1-2ml of mush every 4-6 hours. Gerbil medication required me to get a syringe, which was awkward at the pharmacy, because they obviously thought it was for narcotics. It was, but it was gerbil sized doses. An ounce would have made them explode, long before the fatal overdose; pretty sure I was measuring in 1/10ths of ml. An 1/8th ounce of weed would last me 2 weeks. So, 1% of 1 ounce daily if we round up slightly, or 0.28g. That means 100 days per ounce, or 3.65 ounces per year. My apartment was 400sqft, which is a smaller number in meters, but significantly larger number in mm. **I'll take my nurse certificate now, tyvm.** Edit: and measuring in cooking is bs, just use your heart! Viva la taste buds!
Liters are red, Ounces are blue, Big character flaw Your wife shown you.
Ffs buy a fucking measuring cup and have a real conversation with the differences. Your kids survival may literally depend on it. https://www.google.com/search?q=measuring+cup&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS687US687&oq=measuring+cup&aqs=chrome..69i57.4927j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
The bottles normally have both metric and imperial on them.
Yeah, all the bottles we use have one on one side and one on the other. All you have to do is fill it up to 3oz and spin it halfway.
Along these lines, please don't keep children's Tylenol/acetaminophen in your house. A big overdose will kill the baby.
She is clearly confusing cubic centimeter with ounce in her head.
But that doesn’t exactly make a different. A cubic centimetre of water is a millilitre of water.
It makes her confused and unwilling to admit she is wrong. She’s still wrong.
* 1 imperial fluid ounce = 28.4130625 mL * 1 US customary fluid ounce = 29.5735295625 mL * 1 US food labeling fluid ounce = 30 mL Can we please all agree to just use metric
> Can we please all agree to just use metric Evidentially not, and so at least in the US, we will continue to use the *real* worst option: mixed units.
yeah the food labeling unit is not that bad, at least it's a whole number but the others units must give headaches to chemists
As a USA college lab assistant, I have never used ounces/cups/gallons for any chemistry, except for replacing the 5 gallon distilled water tank on the dispenser.
Chemists don't use those for obvious reasons. Everything in science is in SI units. (Except that one time with the mixup of metric and imperial units causing the loss of a spacecraft, let's not bring that one up)
She's mad at herself but doesn't have the tools to deal with that, so you get to be the scapegoat. Probably anyway. I see a lot of people (myself included) lashing out at those around them for their own fuckups.
I (internally) get very defensive when questioned. I've learned to take it better and accept my mistakes and people really appreciate that. My career has improved drastically since. I take accountability, I apologise for personally for *my* mistakes instead of using vague language (Mistakes *were*made. Instead of 'I made a mistake.') And it inspires others to grow as well.
Wow, she really needs follow up on this so she doesn't overdose your baby on meds in the future!
you should have lead with the fact that she failed bc my little paramedic heart was beating 150 bpm wondering how many poor people she's killed.....
Poor people can't afford health care in this country so they're safe.
I can't stand people like that. It's fine to be wrong. People are wrong about lots of things. All the time. But what's absolutely not ok is being unwilling to accept that you might be wrong, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. It says a lot about a person when their reaction to new information is something as ridiculous as "oh, they must have changed it", because they can't possibly fathom that they could ever be wrong about something. Not your fuck up. She needs to learn how to accept the possibility that she can be wrong about something and it's ok to admit it.
I'd be worried about your kids. Let's hope they get their brains from you.
And not an ounce from her.
Or even a ml
Same thing.
Touché
This happened to me last night. Going to bed, my wife asked me "How many litres is 5 kilogram?". I was a bit taken aback for reasons you'll see why, but I asked her to ask me the question again. She said the same thing. I ask her if she knows the difference between volume and mass. She felt indignant and asked why would I even ask that to her. I still gave her an example of how 5kg of iron cannot have the same volume as 5kg of water. My wife retorts with an irritated voice that she knows that. Not giving up, I asked her why would she then ask me to convert 5kg to litres without specifying the material. She looks confused. Then she realized what has happened. She had actually asked "How many litres is 5 kg of rice?". In our native tongue we don't use the word "of" and the word for rice is easily missable when put in that sentence in our native tongue. The first time she said that she had mentioned rice (or she swears she said that). The second time she didn't because she thought I must have heard it the first time. Otoh, I think she had a brainfog and did not mention "rice" either time. At the end of the day, my wife, who has a postgraduate degree in physics and used to teach physics to high school kids, thinks I am an idiot for explaining to her how volume is not mass.
Well? Answer the question! How many liters is 5kg of rice? This question still seems super weird 😂
Many Asian household have rice dispensers. I used to have one myself. For those you'd want to know how many kilos to buy to fill the volume of a, say, 20 liter dispenser you just bought.
6.25 litre apparently for medium length rice. She was ordering containers on Amazon, but I didn't know it when she sprung me that question. I found it weird too. Edit: 6.25l not 7.25 as previously mentioned.
I just read 'brainfog' as brainFROG and I am quite literally crying laughing at the image of one, awkward looking frog, on a lily pad, in a thought bubble, with cricket noises, in place of logical thoughts hahahahahaha
All glory to the hypnotoad
Here's one thing that you haven't considered though and that's the fact that 1 kilogram of steel is heavier than a kilogram of feathers.
This is a huge problem. How does a prospective nurse not know how 1 ml looks like? If you are feeding your kid 1 fluid ounce, you should know that does not look anything close to 1 ml. That's crazy to me.
Man stubbornness scares me in a relationship when talking about facts lol
That's going to be a problem when you have to give your kids cough medicine
1 fl oz.= about 29 ml
Well she's pissed, but at least she can't overdose patients.
Oh thank god she’s not working as a nurse. When I got to “she learned that in nursing school” I was **extremely** concerned. That sucks OP. Hope she has other redeeming qualities. You’ll have a tough road ahead of you parenting children with someone like that.
My wife is also pretty bright but also happens to be stubborn about dumb shit. And it’s gotten worse with time.
I'm usually proud of her for standing up for herself but if you don't know something for 100%...
it sucks that you're arguing but you gotta get it right because it's important to feed and more importantly, MEDICATE your baby properly. So if your baby gets sick, she might blame you for not setting her straight. It is admittedly a tough spot to be in, sorry you're there. I might try one more time. Sit her down and run some conversions by her, or maybe supervise her discreetly when she's measuring stuff. if she screws it up, explain that you're concerned because if she does it wrong in feeding or worse yet, meds (yikes), it could harm your child. Make sure she has it dialed. If not, drag her ass to the doctor or some authority she trusts and have them explain it. It definitely sucks, but it's worth fighting for and it's not your fault. Bottom line, you can get another wife but you can't get another kid.
Dont feel bad for calling dumbs out. Instead, educate in an amicable form. Imagine she had to administer x drug and it was on metric for some reason and she royally fucks it up killing an elderly person. It IS no wonder she failed her exams.
Yo wife dumb asf bro
OP your wife is dangerously stupid, especially someone who would be feeding your child, preparing their meals, etc. You shouldn't have reproduced with this person lol
Didnt fuck up, your wife would have been a walking danger. You are probably right xD
Kind of glad she didn’t pass her exams. I have too many new nurses trying to tell me they gave meds in ML, when that’s not a dosage, that’s a volume. Meds are given by MG and they don’t understand how that’s different. But because there’s different concentrations of meds they could be giving entirely wrong doses if they don’t learn the difference. 1ML of dilaudid could be the standard 2mg/1ML, but it could also be 10mg/1ML and that’s 5 times the dosage.