Aightball

Being a CNA is a very rewarding thing! I've been a CNA for 9 years and have never looked back. If you can't get past the duties, perhaps you are not ready to be a nurse. The nurses in the hospital I work in do just as much "clean up" as the techs go. If you are indeed serious about nursing, get your CNA and work as a CNA for a while. At least a year. You'll be better prepared to be a nurse and will not have to struggle as much to understand the terminology or understand what your duties are.

YAY!! I've been a CNA for 8 years now and I work as a tele tech. It was getting to be too much on my back and hips to work on the floor =(. Welcome to the best time of your life to the new CNA's. One word of advice: throw out the book and learn your own way of dealing with things. It will really help you and will help you in a time crunch.

I had this happen to me twice in one night! I was sitting tele and someone had come down to take a couple second break from the floor (we're in our own seperate room). We were chatting and we both looked up at the same time to the monitor and she went tearing out of the room to get a nurse into the room. The lady had gone into v-fib, then v-tach and suddenely right back into a-fib (her normal rythm). She was a DNR so we couldn't have done anything for her other than be with her, but they got the family in there and everything. The next night I get back and the day tele tech said she'd done the same thing for her twice and the family was waking this lady up. After the nurses said to let her go, she never did this again. In fact, she went home a couple of days later. It boggles the mind!

We have two places for tele: my ward and ICU. ICU can watch both theirs and ours and we can only watch ours. But I know that when I watch tele, the nurses are relying on me to catch changes in their patients. I sti in my own room, with two monitors. I can have *thinks* 27 teles at once, and the nurses need me to know what's going on and alert them to changes. A great example of that is at shift change. Maybe a nurse has been off for a few days and has never had this patient before. While they are getting report, the tele tech going off and the tele tech coming on are watching the rythms and if something happens, it's up to us to tell the nurses. My feeling is this: once I've told the nurse what happened, it's in their hands. I appreciate it when they come dow to keep tabs on their patient, but if I don't hear back from them, I don't feel blown off. I feel like they have the problem in their hands and are dealing with it the way they have to :).