A nurse shot up hospital drugs at home and had a loaded gun at work, state says
Baker County registered nurse Tiffany Rhoden has had her license restricted after several findings detailed in a Florida Department of Health emergency restriction order (ERO):
▪ Rhoden’s husband found her unconscious on their Glen Saint Mary home bathroom floor with “an intravenous port hanging out of her chest.”
▪ Her hospital found drugs missing that she supposedly picked up for the hospital.
▪ A hospital manager found a loaded handgun in Rhoden’s desk.
Friday’s ERO was the first state discipline Rhoden’s faced since getting her RN license Feb. 12, 2014. Now, the ERO said, she’s got a warrant for her arrest on a charge of grand theft of a controlled substance.
Rhoden used to work at Ed Fraser Memorial Hospital in Macclenny, near Jacksonville, as an operating room director. In November, the ERO said, Ed Fraser staff saw Rhoden as “spiraling out of control,” often with a “disheveled” appearance.
At home, the ERO said, Rhoden looked worse. The aforementioned scene on the bathroom floor happened in early November. She refused treatment after her husband called an ambulance.
Injected herself with antibiotics
On Nov. 27, Rhoden injected herself with antibiotics because, she told her husband, she wasn’t feeling well.
“Shortly afterward, Ms. Rhoden became very lethargic and slurred her speech,” the ERO said. “She informed her husband that she had an “allergic reaction” to the antibiotics. Ms. Rhoden then injected herself with Benadryl and became very sleepy. Approximately 30 minutes later, Ms. Rhoden injected herself with epinephrine because she “wanted to wake herself up.””
While Benedryl is an over-the-counter antihistamine, epinephrine is synthetic adrenaline. And her husband found an empty vial and a needle with “a milky substance,” a description of propofol. As an operating room director, Rhoden would’ve been familiar with propofol, which the DOH says “is used to induce general anesthesia” and is injected.
OR staff at Ed Fraser, in early December, saw anesthesia carts missing lidocaine and propofol. A staffer ordered more. Rhoden picked it up that night. But, on Dec. 5, she placed another order of OR medications that the pharmacy thought was “larger than normal.”
The next day, an audit of the OR meds found “a large number of the medications that Rhoden had picked up the prior day were missing.”
That’s the day the human resources manager found the loaded handgun in a drawer of Rhoden’s desk.
A check of surveillance video showed Rhoden had come to the OR on her days off, taking medications and supplies. That fit with her husband telling the director of nursing that he’d found two intravenous needles, a saline flush bag and four empty medication vials in the trash at home.
Rhoden didn’t show up for a shift. Ed Fraser fired her on Dec. 9.
“Shortly after this incident, Ms. Rhoden admitted to her husband that she had a problem with propofol dependence,” the ERO said.
