Tort. Assault. Battery. Neglect. These are words that make every nurse(and nursing student) break out into a cold sweat, to re-evaluate their chosen career. Because you see, the law is not kind to nurses..the law is brutal. You hear about all these terms, all the legal mumbo-jumbo and you're like "Whatev-I'm not a lawyer. I don't need to know that stuff."
But you do need to know it, & the biggest thing you need to know is that YOU DOCUMENT EVERYTHING that you did. Because if you don't document, it didn't happen. And maybe you've been a nurse for 25+ years and forget to document something & the hospital fires you and the nursing board revokes your lisence and you don't have the money for a court battle and you have to start over, find another career path. Or maybe the patient suffers actual harm, & you end up in jail.
(I don't think type 1's do well in jail. I think I'd be living at 300+ mg/dl in fear of collapsing from hypoglycemia, and probably not make it out alive.Nothing is under your control in jail,& when you collapse in your cell unconscious the guards probably just let you die.) Therein lies my biggest fear of nursing, and I think that would dictate a fairly low-stress ZERO CHANCE OF DISASTER nursing field. I hear stories of nurses who make just one mistake and their career/life is over,& it scares me to death. These are good nurses, & it happens just like that. But mostly I never want to end up in jail, with no freedom to manage my diabetes and having limited contact with the outside world. To barely see your kid, or your spouse, or anybody..it would feel like you were truly,truly alone. That would be the hardest thing ever. I wonder plenty if everything I don't know is going to impair my being a nurse(should that ever happen), and its just scary to think about the consequences of that ignorance/forgetfulness.
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