Every semester in nursing school we are required to get a PPD skin test to determine whether we have tuberculosis or not. Every semester my PPD skin test has come back negative - until this summer.
This summer in order to work at the hospital I had to go through all of their procedures before acquiring the job. I had to be cleared by the occupational therapist, show my current CPR certification, and take a TB Gold test. This test is different than the PPD skin test because it works by taking whole blood to determine whether there is Mycobacterium tuberculosis present. There was. This meant that I then had to go back to the hospital to have chest x-rays done to see if I have an active case of tuberculosis. Fortunately for me I did not show an active TB infection, which means that I have a latent case of tuberculosis. This means that I cannot give TB to anyone through the usual route (air droplets) but rather that the bacteria lives dormant in my lungs until it may or may not become active at a later date.
The question that has been plaguing me since this information arose has been - how did I get it? Who did I come into contact with that had an active case of TB? I do not believe that I got it in the hospital, because I did not take care of any patients that had a TB infection. The only thing that I can think of is if I got it from the community. This last semester we spent a lot of time with underprivileged persons and outreach programs in my area. This could have very easily been transferred through the air by someone who sneezed or cough in an area around me. This was a huge wake-up call for me. As much as I have learned about disease and the risk of transmission to healthcare workers, I don’t think I fully understood how real and dangerous this profession can be at times. If there is ever an outbreak of a disease, it will be nurses who are at the frontline taking care of those patients. This is something that nursing school tries to teach us, but that I could only really understand when it happened to me.
This truly is a dangerous profession. We must be ever vigilant to ensure that we are educating the population about disease prevention and following our own advice to ensure the safety of our patients, our lives, and our family’s lives.
Has something like this ever happened to you? Have you ever experienced an infection from a patient, or a close-call? I would love to hear your stories.
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