When Oopsies Leads to Death: Student Nurse Who Injected Patient With Coffee Argues 'Anyone Can Get Confused'
In a plotline so dark not even Scrubs would touch it—and Scrubs was not afraid to go dark; it had comedy and heart—a student nurse has been indicted for involuntary manslaughter for killing a patient by accidentally injecting her with coffee instead of IV fluid.
The student, 23-year-old Rejane Moreira Telles, had been working at a clinic in Brazil for just three days when she made the error, meaning that on one-third of her workdays she injected a patient with coffee and killed her.
Telles defended herself in an interview with news program Fantástico by saying that "anyone" might have confused the feed drip with the blood drip.
"As [the feed and blood drips] were next to each other, anyone can get confused. I injected the coffee and I put it in the wrong place."
By the same token, "anyone" could probably have done the job correctly.
The daughter of the 80-year-old woman who was killed was on hand for the mix-up, and described the moment the nurse injected her mother with coffee:
"I saw my mother was agitated, she opened her mouth, and this youngster put coffee with milk into the veins of my mother. Half a glass."
Telles maintains that she was not trained in the kind of procedure she was performing. So she probably shouldn't have given it the old college try.
