Making Mistakes

Learning to screw up in a new field is no fun

Inside the dim room, the teenage patient sits cross-legged on the bed. His parents stand off to the side. A second man sits at the foot of the bed, back to me, talking to someone on speakerphone.

I hear the word “Starbucks” and immediately assume this is a family coordinating lunch. It sounds casual.

“Hi!” I say to the patient in a stage whisper. “I’m Anna, one of the Child Life volunteers. I heard you might be interested in the Nintendo Switch —”

The person on the phone whirls around and waves a hand at me in the universal sign for, shut up.

Suddenly everything snaps into focus. The person shushing me is a doctor. He has another doctor on speaker phone, who’s explaining an upcoming procedure to the family, gathered around the bed. I must’ve misheard “Starbucks,” and I’ve cluelessly interrupted a medical discussion to talk about a Nintendo Switch.

I back out of the room and make it into a bathroom stall just in time to start bawling.

Intellectually, I know it’s no big deal—I misread the room. But feelings have their own logic.

For several minutes I cannot stop crying.

I’m not cut out for this, I think. I should walk out of this hospital right now, quit volunteering and withdraw from nursing school before it starts.

I know my thoughts are irrational, dramatic and way out of proportion to the reality of the situation. I think I’ve come to understand why, which I’ll come back to, but for now, this brings me to my main topic here: coping with mistakes, and the scariness of learning how to do that all over again in the coming years.

When I was working as a journalist, I took great effort to avoid mistakes and learned to avoid some common ones, but they still happened from time to time. When they did, I followed a familiar protocol.

If someone pointed out a possible error in my work, the first step was to tell my editor, and then to check it out. Did I actually get something wrong? If so, write a correction that names the error in the most precise language possible. If not, what is the complaint really about, and does it still need to be addressed in some way?

I’ll give you examples. Once, the subject of an article complained that by leaving out the second half of a quote, I’d omitted a key point.

The story was about possible financial misconduct by the subject’s business partners. He’d told me he didn’t know anything about it and that if he had, he wouldn’t have participated in the transaction in question. I printed the first part—his statement that he didn’t know—but left out the second part because, in my opinion, it didn’t add much. It spoke to a hypothetical situation (“if I’d known…”) and the important point for readers was that he denied knowledge of the questionable activity.

My editor and I agreed that this wasn’t a mistake. It didn’t warrant a correction. However, at the same time we could understand the subject’s sensitivity, and it didn’t hurt the story to add the second half of his quote. So we updated the digital version of the article with that extra line.

Another time, I wrote an article about California Governor Gavin Newsom suing cities in the state for failing to follow certain housing laws. I cited Newport Beach as an example. The only problem? The administration hadn’t sued Newport Beach; it had sued Huntington Beach.

I was alerted by a very polite but pointed email from the mayor of Newport Beach, asking that we correct the record ASAP.

We did, of course, but let me tell you, even after more than a decade of reporting, admitting mistakes never got easier. It felt awful (and, arguably, it should) to realize that I’d publicly broadcast incorrect information purely because of my own sloppiness.

Making mistakes always sent me down a shame spiral, though over the years I learned to accept those spirals as short, temporary discomforts. They never stopped, but they became shorter over the years, and I made fewer mistakes too.

Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in the literature of medical mistakes. I recently reread a chilling, Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times series from 2005 about the now-shuttered King/Drew Medical Center. That led me to the book Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America’s Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes, written by one of the experts quoted in the series.

It’s a terrifying read indeed, and some of the book’s insights ring true from journalism.

The authors write about how many medical errors occur when doctors or nurses are performing rote tasks they’ve repeated hundreds or thousands of times, versus during new procedures. In other words, errors happen when you go on autopilot and zone out at work.

That’s exactly what happened with my Newport/Huntington Beach mixup. I’d covered housing and homelessness for so long, I’d gotten into a habit of writing the background information on certain stories off the top of my head. Usually I’d go back and carefully fact-check everything, but that day I was on a tight deadline, accidentally typed the name of the wrong Orange County beach city, and didn’t catch it.

I can’t prevent myself from making future mistakes by reading books, but I can hopefully shore up my vigilance by learning more about how errors happen. In doing so, I hope I’ll set myself up to avoid egregious errors, even if small ones are inevitable.

My clumsy interruption of a medical conversation while volunteering at the hospital was my first real mistake in that setting. I think that’s why it hit so hard. It was a very small mistake, but it pierced the pink cloud of being a volunteer who couldn’t mess anything up because I barely had any responsibilities.

When I told my supervisor about my misstep, she shrugged.

“I’ve done that too,” she said. “It happens.”

I went back to the room about an hour later. This time, I took a moment to absorb the scene inside before speaking.

I introduced myself, briefly apologized for interrupting earlier, then offered the patient the Nintendo Switch.

“No thanks,” he said.

I left to continue down my patient list.

Despite my immediate emotional outburst, the mistake didn’t define my week, my day or even my shift. It did, however, remind me that in choosing to pursue an entirely new career, I’m going to make dumb rookie mistakes. I’m going to get shushed and corrected, I’m going to feel mortified at times, and this time the stakes are high because they involve people’s health.

I’m going to have to learn how to handle mess ups all over again, and I’m not happy about it, but I’m willing to learn.