Published
Ohhhhh, yes.......My son is a CNA and a good one, but he still retches at times when confronted with especially odoriferous emanations. I keep reminding him that this is nothing compared with what he's going to be dealing with as a paramedic! :barf01:
I was a CNA myself before I was an RN, and in all this time I've never gotten sick because of something I saw or smelled at work. I've come pretty close a time or two, especially when I was new, but I've never actually tossed my cookies, which is good for someone who once couldn't even clean up her own kids' vomit! LOL
You do get used to it, really you do.
Mucus is what gets me. I used to work with patients on ventilators and learned how to suction them. You wouldn't believe the massive amounts of mucus that came out of them sometimes. I can deal with BM, vomit, blood, urine, and anything else that there might be.....but mucus....NO WAY!!!!!
Mucus is what gets me. I used to work with patients on ventilators and learned how to suction them. You wouldn't believe the massive amounts of mucus that came out of them sometimes. I can deal with BM, vomit, blood, urine, and anything else that there might be.....but mucus....NO WAY!!!!!
I actually know many CNAs and RNs who say that mucus is the one thing that bothers them. It isn't really a problem for me unless it's coming out of someone's butt...
eveningsky339, LPN
170 Posts
Self-explanatory thread.
I've only had three times where I *almost* puked. My gut wretched, but I quietly left the room before anything could happen.
1. Resident had a massive BM and a fissured hemorrhoid at the same time. It was my very first night orienting. I left in a hurry.
2. Resident's colostomy bag didn't seal properly and she had a massive BM at the dinner table. Guess who got to clean it up? The smell of that thing is horrendously overpowering, and between that and wiping the raw stoma which was beginning to bleed... oh lord.
3. My favorite hemorrhoid resident in #1 has developed a habit of letting out very wet farts when I roll him to change his brief. And you know what comes out in one of these farts? Mucus. Rivers of mucus. I'll never understand why, in the name of all that is holy, mucus is coming out of that man's orifice.