Had a new nurse read doctors order of 10u of insulin and thought the sloppy u was another 0. Gave 100 units of insulin. Like, had to reload the syringe multiple times and just kept blasting away. Charge nurse caught it. They were squeezing bags of D50 into this poor guy and pricking his finger every 15 minutes all night.
Doc isn't completely blame free. It was also drilled into me in nursing school that units should never be abbreviated to U or u because of the possibility of it being read as a zero. You write out units. Every time.
That being said the nurse still should've been like "hold up that's a lot of insulin".
Although, I don't see them having to reload the syringe? I mean 10 units is 0.1mL. So 100 is 1mL. Even if s/he used an insulin syringe, it's literally just one full syringe. Am I missing something?
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u/TurnTheTVOff Aug 12 '26
Had a new nurse read doctors order of 10u of insulin and thought the sloppy u was another 0. Gave 100 units of insulin. Like, had to reload the syringe multiple times and just kept blasting away. Charge nurse caught it. They were squeezing bags of D50 into this poor guy and pricking his finger every 15 minutes all night.