OswinOswald

When I was inpatient in a psych unit, I used the sharp edge of a plastic spoon I broke in half. They do checks every fifteen minutes; it took me ten minutes to do it. Crazy stuff.

Done, we'll see what happens.

At this point, the mechanical lift is off the table, since the one she has is broken. I haven't attempted it on her, but lifting her seems doable. As for the girl that I had trouble with, I don't know if you can safely put someone with uncontrollable jerky movements onto a mechanical lift safely.

I just had a job offer from a woman, and she seems pretty great, but the only part I'm worried about is this transfer. She is a paraplegic with limited arm movement, so she cannot bear weight and can't really assist at all with transferring. She does own a mechanical lift but doesn't like using it, and frankly, I don't feel comfortable operating one by myself. She's short and thin, but in my experience, that doesn't make it much better. I had a job for about a day with a girl in her twenties who required this lift and needed a transfer where you carried her like a baby to get her to the chair- I had a lot of trouble with this transfer, even though this girl was tiny. I'm generally frustrated that the state (this is not an agency job but one directly for the state, as was the one I couldn't do) will not make exceptions with refusing to pay more than one person at a time for this work. If the woman who just offered me a job was in a nursing home, she would have a hoyer transfer, and the girl would be at least a two person transfer. The girl had severe dyskinesia, and she had had multiple injuries from being dropped. It's possible, it's just not incredibly safe.

I've been looking for a job, and some of the ones I've applied to require a urine test. I have a prescription, I'm just worried about people jumping to conclusions about why I'm on an antipsychotic (no, I'm not schizophrenic).

I'm a new CNA, and I just started my first job in LTC. I love it, but there are specific things that make things unusually difficult. Oddly enough, all the alarms don't bother me- I thought they might, since I've had issues with loud noises before, but it's a relief that these ones don't. It's more stuff along the line of people telling me things and not give me a chance to process them before saying the next thing. I also have a hard time with body language, but it's more like thinking something's wrong and asking what's wrong when nothing is wrong. I guess I also ask too many clarifying questions sometimes, but I always notice stupid little details that other people know are no big deal. The thing I have a really hard time with is not realizing when residents are confused- some are pretty obvious, but then, I'm just so used to "normal" people saying weird sounding things that I just take a lot more at face value than other people. If anyone has advice or can relate, I'd be happy to hear it.