Betadine blues

So this week in the VA news...

I need to place Foley catheters while on Surgery. I'm currently in a bind because I still need to place 2 more. They are urinary catheters, and it's easiest to do it to people when they're already anesthetized (for obvious reasons). So this week I finally placed my first one.

The scenerio is that good 'ol Marta had things set up for me. But then she AND Dino AND the scrub nurse AND my attending were all trying to tell me how to do it. They tell me to open up the dark orange betadine and quirt it into my sterile tray with all the cotton balls. "Go go go! Squirt it, squirt it!"

And suddenly they were treating it as something that needed to happen SUPER QUICKLY! So I get my sterile gloves on, and Dino says "now move your tray closer to the table so everything is in reach." But sterile gloves are sterile, and unsterile trays are not. SO I use my foot to pull the table closer...but it turns out the table is not a table..but...A LINEN CAN! Yes indeed folks, a linen can works JUST like a garbage can. So I stepped on the lever and FLIPPED THE ENTIRE TRAY. Betadine aaaaall over the floor. I immediately start laughing, as do many other staff members---Dino and Marta spring into action, getting me another Foley kit and situating me better. All I could do though was stand there in sheer embarassment and say to the scrub nurse, "It's OK if you want to laugh. I am." And she said "Hey, you gotta start somewhere."

The next part was a lot of "grab the penis---no GRAB IT! Pull it straight up. Make sure you're pulling it! Now push the catheter in...PUSH! PUSH IT! GO!" I wanted to be like "hey now...WHOOOOOA...let's all just take a deeeeep breath and take it down a notch."

In the end, it all got done. With extra jabs at me from my attending and interns the rest of the day. "You don't put betadine on the floor." Or one intern to the other, who hadn't witnessed the incident, "Hey J...you want to take a betadine bath?"

Sigh.