“Have you ever experienced a strong feeling of deja vu or a glitch in the Matrix?”
Actually, yeah. And this was a shared glitch in the Matrix that several years on I just, I don’t understand. And I still, I work with the person now that that happened with and we talk about it, you know, rarely, but when it comes up, we’re both like, “No, that, that happened.” And we don’t know why. So I was in nursing school and I was doing my first clinicals, and this woman, who I now work with on the floor, she is a nurse practitioner. And she’s like the nursing supervisor now. She also still teaches at that school, she still does clinicals, she’s still an instructor. She was my instructor at the time. And we were about to pass meds, we were about to give out patient medications. 10 a.m. meds. So we go in the med room and I have my little sheet, my MAR, my medication administration record. I know the two meds my patient is going to get. These are not their actual medications, but let’s say their medications are lisinopril and ibuprofen. Those are not their meds, but let’s just say they’re close to those.
So, I go over my sheet. I’ve never passed meds before, so she shows me how to use the machine, the checks that you do to ensure that this is the right patient, the right, you know, all the seven rights of medication administration, all that. Right patient, right med, right dose, all that. So I get the meds out of the machine. I put them in my little baggie with my little med cups, and I have signed out the meds under my instructor. And we wheel the little moving computer out of the med room and we’re going to my patient’s room. And I knock on the door and the patient says “Come in.” Open the door, and it’s the door to the med room. My instructor and I – it’s the door out of the med room. So, we open the door and you can see outside the med room, rather. My instructor and I look at each other and we look around, and we are in the med room. Turn around, there’s the med machine. Look down, my meds aren’t there, the baggie’s not there, the two meds aren’t there, the cups aren’t there. I have not signed these meds out. I have not highlighted on my MAR when I have – because we have MAR, the record, and when you sign the med out, we were to highlight the med on the physical paper to help us learn. I had not highlighted anything. My instructor looks at me and says, “This is gonna sound really, really, really bad. I promise you, I’m asking you this honestly. Did we just get the meds?” And I’m like, “We were outside -” Let’s say 417. That’s not the room number. “We just knocked on 417’s door and opened the door. And she’s like, she said ‘Come in,’ we opened the door and we’re in the med room.”
We went through it all again because – and we’re both kinda shaking at this point. We get the meds out, we leave the med room, we go to her door knock on it, open it. It’s her room. Everything after that goes normally. To this day, neither of us knows what happened. There was no, there was no – it was not carbon monoxide. Neither of us were on drugs. It still gets me a little shaky thinking about it because I don’t know what happened. The shared experience. Because we talked about it, privately. Because she knew how bad that looked for her. But she knew I was telling her things that she knew were true to our experience and vice versa. Like she said, “You had a problem getting the baggie opened.” And I said, “Yes, I had.” Because I did when I put the meds in the bag the first time, the time that didn’t really happen, apparently. I had trouble opening that bag. She’s like, “Then you had trouble separating the med cups.” And I said, “I did. I ended up putting like four of them in the bag because you said we can separate them when we get to the room.” She’s like, “Yes. You highlighted the meds. We got the meds out. I showed you, you know, how to open the thing, pull the med out, close it, it verifies, and it slides open. And you pulled open two drawers.” And we’re just, we’re going, we’re verifying with each other what happened. We have no idea what happened.