You know you are a CNA when…(explicit…kind of)

1.) Your motto in life quickly becomes “urine is sterile, urine is sterile.”  You have to adapt this dogma if you want to survive in the healthcare industry.  I have had urine splashed on me in more ways than I can even remember.  The incident where it managed to get in my shoe at the beginning of a crazy-ass, hectic, chaotic, hell in a wheelchair eight hour shift is probably the most memorable.  I still shudder when I think about the sound my poor foot made all night as I squished through the halls.  Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

2.)  Smells no longer phase you in the least.  I have smelt everything from a deep GI bleed to vomit that looks as if it came straight out of someone’s asshole.  So when our identical neighbor cat managed to get captured and thrown into our house because someone thought that this cat was Spartacus (my little black and white cat), I had no problems at all scrubbing and scrubbing the cat shit off the walls and out of the carpet for a good hour.  Bret, the poor neighbor cat has been trapped in our house twice now!  He always gets the anxiety shits.  During this second imprisonment, Bret had exploded out of his ass and Travis sat on the couch across the room making faces that little girls make when they see a frog.  This lack of caring about smell also greatly behooves Travis.  That boy unleashes some of the most noise hair-curling, brow-furrowing, room-evacuating farts in the history of all of mankind.  Shit.  I can keep resting my head on his lap.  I’m not bothered.

3.)  You have been in a physical alteration with an elderly person…and they started it.  This is an occupational risk they do NOT teach you about in school.  They teach you “go along with the patient’s delusion, if they want to be the king of England for dinner then let them.”  They do not however tell you what to do when your patient, who is a wickedly strong old farmer, comes after you with a fire of destruction burning in his soul.  Never before have I been so frustrated.  My natural instincts were to fight back but ethics get shady when the RN has to break up a fight between the CNA and one of her patients.  The best you can do is make sure they aren’t about to fall on their face and simply walk away.  Yes, I have come home with teeth marks on my arm, scratch marks on my face, and the imprint of a foot on my chest.  These are just the more memorable injuries.  Deadliest Catch?  Yeah, right…more like Deadliest Elders.

4.)  No one wants to hear your work stories over dinner…or ever.  But if you have read this far, then you have been submitted to a few of them.  I forget that people genuinely do not want to hear about the literal shit storm that I encountered at work.  Yes, a literal shit storm.  Probably should have just burned that bathroom to the ground.

5.)  People die on your watch.  It is the nature of the job.  You grow an immunity to death and dying.  I will admit, this sensation has struck me deeper than it does most CNA’s but it usually works to my advantage.  My hall partners were usually the more sensitive ones which made for a perfect pair when it came to dealing with death.  I took care of the bodily aspects and they dealt with the family.  Voila!  Oh, gallows humor.  My good friend.

I could continue listing the disgusting nature of being a CNA but I will stop torturing you…if you are still reading.  Sometimes you just need to share your work/war stories.  Thank you for coming along with me on this “journey.”  If you ever had questions about entering healthcare, now you have an inkling of an idea of what you are in for.

 

P.S.  Don’t call CNA’s “angels of mercy,” we don’t appreciate it.  And not all CNA’s are equal!  Some of us are poor souls working in an industry that they can’t simply walk away from even to achieve their goal of being a writer for a living.