CNA=Poop cleaner?!

LV3677 · Apr 22, 2015

Yes, you have to clean up poop, as well as anything else that comes out of an orifice. As a CNA, I've cleaned many a person up. However, I wouldn't focus on that as the main part of the job, saying that's "all I do". CNA's do many things, such as vital signs, ambulation, assisting people to eat, etc.

It really does depend on where you work. LTC...yeah, there's gonna be many bathroom trips, and same with medical units. However, there are other units that you can work in that don't have so many code browns.

Honestly, if you're considering going into nursing, I'd recommend being a CNA. I think it provides valuable experience.

mvm2 · Apr 22, 2015

As a nurse she should know that as a nurse you also get to deal with poop throw up and other body fluids as well. Its not just CNA.

Also some nursing programs require you to take a CNA course so I am not sure why she is trying to stop you from getting your CNA. Like the previous poster said getting your CNA will only help you if you ate going for nurse.

BSNMomOf6 · Apr 22, 2015

Thank you! I really would love to work in peds or labor and delivery or postparum. I'm a birth doula already so I've had to help clean up many labor patients in the past, it's not a big deal. She kept insisting all the do is clean poop, that the nurses call them in the rooms just to clean code browns. I was kind of rude the way she kept saying it too.

caliotter3 · Apr 22, 2015

She must have been in some kind of a special funk that day to keep insisting that all CNA's do is poop duty. You can even luck out and find a position where poop duty is rare or nonexistent. Go for the CNA course, you will benefit.

hookyarnandblanket · Apr 23, 2015

Poop cleaner? Yes, and...personal assistant, hairdresser, barber, housekeeping, dietary, activity director, postman/woman, spiritual advisor, counselor, therapist, coach, motivational speaker, hands, eyes, ears, feet, grief support, laundry, fashion consultant, manicurist, personal trainer, mediator, and sadly, sometimes, the closest thing they have to family.

It is terribly shortsighted of your neighbor to be so dismissive of what we do. It goes so much beyond basic ADLs and to the core of the human experience.

BSNMomOf6 · Apr 23, 2015

Thank you! I can see there are some really special CNAs on here. Maybe she had a bad day...or maybe she is just a grouchy snotty nurse! I don't know her well, we just moved here a few months ago and she works a lot. Maybe that's why shes grouchy! ;-)

GuEsT78 · Apr 23, 2015

Relax. I've done the work and, except for those with some intestinal woes, pooping isn't that big a part of the job. Depending on your number of patients and their situations, t's likely to come in a messy way once a shift or less. That's just a few minutes out of eight hours. It's even less an issue if they're able to get to a toilet, with or without assistance.

All you need to do is look at yourself. How often do you poop in eight hours? Probably once or less. Stuck in a hospital with less than delicious food, people eat less and thus have less needs to go. Drugs and surgeries can even leave them constipated. When I had a hernia surgery a few years back, I didn't poop for days, long after I went home.

Peeing is a much bigger time demand. IVs often means lots of fluids going in and you're like to be expected to track urine volume to make sure fluid out remains close to fluid in. But that's far less messy than dealing with poops. For guys, it's usually little more than handing them a urinal.

And if you like interacting with patients, being the assistant is often better than being the nurse. When I worked on a Hem-Onc unit on nights caring for kids with leukemia, I got far more opportunities to interact with those adorable little kiddies than the nurse I was working with. She had to spend almost all her time managing complex IVs. I may have gripped that my job consisted of "pee-pee checks"â€”monitoring the urine ph of kids getting chemotherapyâ€”but it really wasn't that bad. I considered my real job getting to know those kids so well that I'd know something was going wrong before the numbers turned bad.

What I hated came when I shifted to day shift working with teens. An intelligent head nurse would have seen that days was far too busy and filled with interruptions to handle linen changes and showers (mostly assistant work). Doing them made no sense. Send a teen to to shower, and you could be almost certain that a lab tech would show up needing to draw their blood. Change their sheets on days, and they'd have to sleep with their food crumbs from supper.

Unfortunately, our head nurse was a hyper-critical, authoritarian idiot. She an I clashed regularly when I put my patient's actual needs over checking linen changes boxes. I had one occasion where a boy of about 11 arrived early on a Thursday afternoon with a preliminary diagnosis of leukemia, which is very bad news. Normally, by that time the next day most of his workups would have been completed and our specialists would be discussing with the boy and his parents what treatment meant. Alas, in his case, there was a big medical conference going on. A full day after the boy and his parents had arrived, they'd still not seen a physician, just a resident who hurried in, apologized for the delay, and left.

Needless to say, the boy and his parents were getting extremely anxious. I'd admitted him the day before and his still exclusively my patient since there were no nursing orders. I toyed with counseling them myself since, after 16 months on Hem-Onc, I knew a heck of a lot about the disease. I decided not to do that and chose instead to explain our in-house, movies-on-demand system. A good movie would at least offer them a distraction. That took about ten minutes.

The next day, our ill-tempered head nurse called me in and and berated me, claiming my little act of kindnessâ€”literally the only care our hospital had provided that boy in his first 24 hours, was "wasting time," I should have been changing linens, she said. I resisted doing what I wanted most to do, which was tell her she was a heartless incompetent. I'd learn long before that, in dealing with people like her, the easiest response was to play stupid. Kindness, they did not understand. Stupid, they did.

My ten months of working with teens was often like that. I refused to neglect them to do the check-offs that head nurse liked. No matter how busy I was, when they needed to explain something, I gave them my full attention. I never wanted a situation to arise when they needed to tell me something but didn't. Our staffing on the teen unit took into account that teens often know when something is going wrong. We did not monitor them as closely as little kids.

And when I needed to get post-op patients to the toilet, I never rushed them. Getting up and walking were often very painful, so I let them set the pace. If a bed wasn't changed, no big deal. I knew for a fact that our equally staffed evening shift often had nothing to do. They could do it.

I got even for that head nurse's meanness when I left. My resignation letter detailed what was wrong about day shift. The head nurse had been claiming that our nurses were lazy and unmotivated. I said, the opposite. I said they were quite capable but terribly overworked.

In short, I doubt poop will be that big a deal. Even when it is a big, smelly mess, you can learn to laugh it off. What's likely to really anger and frustrate you are situations where you get a dreadful supervisor, one who treats nurses badly and assistants even worse. Who you work under can make your work far worse than almost any patient imaginable.

If you have a good supervisor, appreciate her. If you get a bad one, look around for a transfer. A bad one will make your life far more miserable than any amount of pooping, puking or whatever. You get used to mess. You don't get used to a boss who is a jerk.

Strive to get along well with the nurse you're working with. Cooperating and sharing the work load will go far better than clashing. I did my best to reduce her work load, knowing that often she'd have to cover for me, for instance, when I had to help with a procedure in the exam room.

--Michael W. Perry

Red Kryptonite · Apr 23, 2015

She kept insisting all the do is clean poop, that the nurses call them in the rooms just to clean code browns. I was kind of rude the way she kept saying it too.

She must be THAT nurse.

BSNMomOf6 · Apr 23, 2015

Thanks everyone! And yes, I think she is THAT nurse. She probably forces the CNAs in her unit to clean her patients, hence saying they are the poop cleaners! Oh well, at least I know not to apply for a job in her unit! She's charge nurse in that unit, ack!

Oh'Ello, BSN, RN · Apr 23, 2015

True story... RN also = Poop cleaner.

calivianya, BSN, RN · Apr 23, 2015

I felt like that was all I did some days when I was a CNA. I fed people and then I cleaned up the results of feeding them. I did vitals, too, but that didn't take long. It was all of the feeding and poop-cleaning that sucked my time up.

I got floated to a post-cath observation unit once or twice... it was a dream come true. The patients were on bedrest for 6 hours, then they were fully ambulatory. They even fed themselves! All I did when I floated to that unit was passed trays and took vitals... maybe once a shift I put someone on a bedpan because they had to go before they were off bedrest. It was wonderful.

So, not all CNA jobs involve cleaning up poop. Just most of them...