TheOneWithGlasses

My employer used to offer paid training but they don't anymore. Most of the new hires here are from Athena Career Academy, which charges around $2000 for the program I think. From the way they talk, I don't think there's financial aid or anything, it sounds like it's pretty much out of pocket. I don't know anything about the two you mentioned. Monroe County Community College recently started a CNA program; I don't know anything about it but I assume you could get some sort of financial aid for it.

Glad you're feeling better. Believe me, I totally understand. I was recently in the hospital overnight for observation for chest pain. I went to the hospital straight from work, so no shower. I was scheduled for tests late in the morning and I wanted to clean up a little and change my gown. I rang twice, once around 6am and once around 9am, for someone to help me change my gown, since I was afraid I would accidentally disconnect my heart monitor or worse pull out my IV. I made it a point to say whenever someone has a chance I'd like to change my gown before my test at 10:30 and I would need help doing so because of the wires. From 6:00 to 11:00, when they came to get me for my test, no one came in to help me change my gown. I know it's just a little thing but geez, there were only five or six patients on the whole unit, at least three nurses and a CNA that I saw, and in five hours no one could help me with a five minute task? For the record, that's the only thing I rang for my entire stay. This is the second time I've had to stay in that hospital and both times I felt like they considered me a nuisance. It wasn't any one thing, just the general attitude. Like you knew in your gut that they were rolling their eyes when they left the room. As a patient I go out of my way to do for myself and not ring the call light a lot, treat the staff politely, and just try to not be the kind of patient I deal with at work every day. I take care of ten or more residents a day in LTC and I feel horrible when I have to tell someone I'll have to come back to do____. I make sure I actually make it back and do it asap. I just kept thinking man, no one at my workplace would dare dream of being like that.

I live in the Monroe area and while there are plenty of jobs for CNAs at the long term care facilities they're all part time. I can't think of any around here that are hiring full time CNAs. At my workplace it's not uncommon to be working one or two days a week as a CNA and the rest of the week somewhere else, like a restaurant. I was extremely lucky to get in a few years ago when they were hiring full time. As for hospitals the one here doesn't hire CNAs very often but a bit north of here Oakwood Hospital always has tons of listings on their website. It's all about location. I totally agree about the Michigan job market. My husband has been laid off for most of the last three years...he'll manage to pick up a temp job for a couple months at a time but that's it. Unless you can do hard physical labor (which he can't) or have a stack of degrees (which he doesn't) you're pretty much out of luck. And now even having a degree isn't a guarantee...heck that's why I'm a CNA with a bachelor's and two associates'. Ugh sorry for the rant but it's tough here.

We've had more than one family member who would openly eat food off the resident's tray and then say the resident was still hungry. We also have to deal with the well-meaning visitors who bring in food the resident can't eat, for example an apple for a resident who has no teeth and is on a puree diet, or a bottle of pop for a diabetic on thickened liquids, and then get irate when we yank it away just as they're about to dig in. It's one thing when they're trying to be nice and bring their family member's roommate a treat too and they honestly don't know, but when it's their family member that they've been visiting for years... A few years ago we had the mystery lady who would come in and apply makeup to female residents. None of the staff had ever seen her before, she appeared to randomly select residents to do, and they looked like Bozo the clown when she got done with them. We could never catch her in the act, we'd just go into a room and find a tarted-up little old lady. She was asked not to come back after she was caught trying to feed a McDonald's apple pie to a semi-conscious dying resident (to whom she had just applied about three pounds of blush). No one saw her again after that. I think maybe it was just someone with a misguided idea of doing a good deed (ie, visiting people in nursing homes), but it was still weird.

Or when you have to go somewhere and it feels weird and wrong to be wearing actual clothes, since you're always in either scrubs or pj's. When you can't understand why people are giving you weird looks when you take the dog out at 3pm and you're wearing a coat over your pj's and are all bleary-eyed. I work 3-11, go home and shower and put on pj's and sit around in them til I go to bed at 4am or so. When I get up around noon I shower and put on my scrubs so I can leave around 2. I've been known to stay in my pj's (or worse, just put on different pj's after showering) on my days off. The other day I had a doctor's appointment and it just felt so strange to be wearing clothes. I estimated it was the first time in probably a week and a half I'd been dressed. :uhoh3: Can't believe I just admitted that...

I have been a CNA for five years. In my facility there's a pretty clear divide--there are the longterm, career aides, and there are the fairly new (ie less than 3-4 years as a CNA) ones who see being an aide as just another step in the becoming-a-nurse process. I just looked at my schedule and of the thirty-plus CNAs on my shift, there are six currently in nursing school and another seven or eight that I know of who are either in the application process or have serious intentions of applying within the next few months. And that's just on my shift--I know of many people on the other shifts who are in school. Becoming a nursing is definitely encouraged at my facility. [hijack] At one time I was looking into getting my RN, even going so far as to submit my statement of interest to the local RN program and taking a couple semesters of pre-reqs. However, I had some problems with my financial aid and had to take some time off school. Although I intended to go back to school once I got my finances straightened out, after a while I started realizing that I looked on becoming a nurse with dread rather than with excitement and that a large part of the reason I was doing it was because other people kept telling me that's what I should want to do. Basically I was going to become a nurse because of peer pressure. Becoming a nurse is a huge step that you should undertake because you wholeheartedly want to. Although I really enjoy being a CNA it's really starting to take a toll on me, and even though I have nothing but respect for the people who are aides for ten, twenty, or thirty years I don't think I want to be one of them. I'm trying to figure out what exactly I want to do. I know it sounds kind of awful but I'm thinking that I'm about ready for a position with less patient care, like HR or medical records or pharmacy technician or something. I just don't want to put more time and money into school to find out that ___ isn't right for me either. [/hijack]

I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my right hip at 29 (I'm 31 now). I also found out I had a bulging disc in my back, I think it was L5-S1. All the doctors tried to tell me yes, there's some arthritis in the hip but the reason it hurts is because of the disc...no one seemed to hear me when I tried to explain that I had had hip pain and problems since I was 8-10 years old (maybe even before that, I don't remember) and the back pain had just started in the last few months. I never did find out what could have caused it; I never had any severe injuries, didn't play any sports and didn't have any of the mentioned conditions, as far as I know. It doesn't run in the family either. The ortho didn't seem too concerned with the "why". I think I'm gonna have to push the issue a little the next time I go in. I've had a hard time finding information on osteoarthritis that's geared towards people less than sixty or so...most of the resources assume that if you're young and have arthritis it's rheumatoid arthritis or is caused by CDH or some other condition. I hope you have better luck finding info.

At our facility one of the big things is that day shift doesn't really understand how dramatically the residents' behavior changes in the evenings--the whole sundowners thing. So evening shift is continually writing behavior reports and the day shift's attitude is *shrug* "Well they're fine for us" and it seems pretty clear they think we've gotta be exaggerating. One day we were short-staffed and a CNA from days stayed over and was absolutely flabbergasted at how the residents were acting. She kept saying, "Wow, they act so different at night" and I was like "THANK. YOU. Now tell everyone what you've seen here tonight" lol.

I completely agree with the suggestion to put a little ice cream on the tip of the spoon. We have one resident that won't eat anything unless we do this, but will eat 100% if it's got a little dab of ice cream on it. A lot of times when he starts acting uninterested or refuses to open his mouth we give him a couple bites of just ice cream and that gets him eating again. Another resident who's on a puree diet will not eat anything from a spoon but if we make a shake out of food and milk or water will drink it. That leads to some pretty nasty concoctions, though, like the "fish shake" that had us giggling and gagging at the same time...she seemed to like it though. She smiled and made her happy noise (a sort of guttural squeal) when we gave it to her. I don't mind the actual feeding, since it's often the only time in the shift we can sit down and take our time with a task, as well as talk with each other and the residents. What I hate is passing and picking up trays, and also when we're short-staffed and have to feed three or four residents each--no sitting and talking then, that's for sure. On second thought, one thing that does drive me batty about feeding is the residents who open their mouth a teenytiny amount and you can just barely get the tip of the spoon in there. They just sort of lick the tip of the spoon off and then smack their lips repeatedly**. It takes *forever* to feed them. Our facility doesn't have many of the small coated spoons (which we're not supposed to call baby spoons but that's pretty much what they are) and they're reserved for the residents who eat too fast and choke (the smaller spoon slows them down and they can't cram their mouths as full) so we just have to keep plugging along with the regular spoon. **I've noticed that a lot of times when they start eating like this it's not too long before they are unable to eat at all. It's like it's the last stage of eating solid foods and it reminds me a lot of how babies react when you first start giving them solid food.

I've dropped the (digital, aural) thermometers a couple times at work but fortunately they were okay other than the back cover popping off. This past summer I broke a large clock in a resident's room. It was hanging over the glove holder just outside the bathroom. As I was leaning around the doorway, wetting washcloths with one hand while trying to wiggle a glove out of the box with the other, the box moved upward, hit the bottom of the clock and sent it crashing to the floor. There was a huge boom along with the crash of the glass clock face shattering. Apparently it was louder than I realized because staff came running from the next unit to see what happened. The whole time, the resident sat calmly in her chair and didn't even flinch (and yes, her hearing's fine so she had to have heard it). She didn't even seem to care what had happened but I felt horrible for a long time after.

After nearly five years at the same facility I received two write-ups within the space of a few weeks. One I admit I totally deserved; I tried to transfer a resident incorrectly and ended up having to ease them to the floor. I was written up for failure to follow proper procedure. A lot of other CNAs were telling me I should fight it but I said why? I didn't look at the patient's ADL flowsheet beforehand--if I had, like I should've, I would have seen that the resident's transfer status had changed since the last time I cared for them. I made an assumption, I screwed up and I admitted it. I was quite upset when I got it but I moved on and learned from it. The other one I guess I deserved but I feel a little more bitter about it. I have intermittent back problems that were caused by working at this facility, in addition to arthritis that I had before but has been worsened by the nature of the work. We had a couple weeks where it rained nearly every day and I was in a lot of pain. One day it was really bad so I called in sick. Not long after that I got written up (first warning) for calling in too many times. The attendance policy states you'll be written up for calling in three times in ninety days and technically I did, but the first two were within a few days of each other and the third one wasn't until eighty days later. I thought about going to management and trying to argue it but since I haven't seen the doctor about my back or arthritis in months (and I didn't see him that day) I don't have any documentation to back me up. The attendance one will be dismissed from my record if I don't call in at all for ninety days (and now I'm paranoid about getting sick or my car breaking down or something) but the other one is on my record for good.

I learned this one the hard way...when you remove the bag to take it and empty it in the toilet, 1) put a washcloth or small towel over the stoma, and 2) hurry. I'll never forget the sight of the resident spurting liquid bm from their stoma...I swear it went out a good three feet before it splattered all over everything. Also make very sure you put the clip back on the bottom, and that it's clipped securely. Fortunately that was on the resident that had pasty, infrequent, slow-moving bm, and I realized my mistake before I had a disaster.

Wow, sandwiches? I don't know what the 10am snack is at our facility, but most of the snacks at 3pm and HS are graham crackers or cheese crackers with milk, ice cream or sherbet, or cookies. Sometimes they also offer sliced peaches or some fruit cocktail. A couple of our ladies get coffee or tea, and once in a while someone who's on puree diet and/or thickened liquids will get sent some pudding. The problem we have is that at 3pm our shift has just started and most of the residents that get snacks were either laid down after lunch and are out cold or have been taken to afternoon activities, so it's hard to get them passed out in a timely fashion. As for the HS snacks, they're delivered so soon after dinner that they get refused like dekatn mentioned. The food storage/walk-in freezer part of the kitchen is locked after the dietary staff leaves for the night (they hightail it out after HS snacks), so if a resident wants something different you have to get the key from the nurse supervisor, which can often be a hassle. I wish they'd leave a few sandwiches or something in the unlocked fridge...of course they'd probably (correctly) assume that staff would eat them.

When I was 17/18, fresh out of high school, I went through a medical assisting course at the local community college. I was by far the youngest in the class; most of my classmates were stay-at-home moms or recently divorced women re-entering the work force. If I remember correctly it was a semester of combined pre-reqs (medical terminology etc) and administrative skills, a semester of clinical skills, and a semester of externship. There was no job placement assistance; the expectation was your externship would offer you a job and if they didn't that was okay because employers would be beating down your door. For maybe half of my classmates that worked out, but I did poorly in my externship (aced my classes but didn't have the maturity, work experience, or self-confidence to actually do the work unsupervised, and the staff at the place had very little patience with me, which eroded my confidence even more) so after graduation I found myself without any job prospects. At that time there were very few job openings for m.a.'s and they all paid much lower than our instructors had led us to believe--some were barely above minimum wage. After nearly a year of unsuccessfully looking for a job I gave up and started working in another field. I'm not totally sorry I took it, because I learned some skills that I've used in other jobs and in my personal life as well. I also think that if I ever go to nursing school it will help me because I won't be totally unfamiliar with some of the things I'd be learning...i.e. I would have a basic idea of some of the basics. On the other hand, it was so long ago that many of the things we learned are incredibly outdated...for example, how to safely recap a needle, how to package gloves to be autoclaved (both sterile gloves and "clean" gloves), how to fill out a carbon-triplicate insurance form by hand (computerized billing? what's that?)...I really can't see this stuff still being useful. I was lucky, because I still lived at home and could take my time looking for a job, but I can't help wondering what happened to the single moms and stuff who were relying on this program to get them a better job to support their families. These types of schools/programs target people who are stuck and are desparate enough to believe the advertising.

I definitely agree with everyone who said to prepare beforehand. For example, before you ambulate a resident into the bathroom, open the bathroom door so you don't have to fumble with it while you're holding on to the resident. Take washcloths, depends, and whatever else you'll need into the bathroom before you take the resident in there. Little things like that add up to a lot of time and stress saved. Make it a habit to glance into every room, every time you walk down the hall. You might discover an accident about to happen (like a non-ambulatory resident trying to stand up from their wheelchair) and be able to prevent it. Never hesitate to ask another nurse aide to help you with a heavy or combative resident. Sadly, a lot of times a facility has this culture of "Only wimps can't do it alone", and that's the kind of attitude that leads to back injuries or worse...trust me on this one. I'm keeping the makers of Advil in business because I thought I had to prove what a good aide I was by doing things alone I should've gotten help with. Finally, when you think they can't possibly be wet because you just changed them...they'll be soaked.