Day One

Today has been a day of firsts: first time blogging, and my first time working as a nurse (well kind of). Yay for me! I've been spending tons of time lately immersing myself in the lives of nurses via their blogs (especially guitar girl rn!) and was inspired to start my own, documenting my journey from Nursing Assistant in training, to LVN, to RN, to FNP, that is if all goes according to plan.

Background: I'm on the waitlist for the nursing program at my community college, an estimated three year wait. Because of a combination of my own laziness, and false information given to me by a few school counselors it is practically impossible for me to get into nursing school any where except for a community college, thus avoiding the wait. Could I really sit around and wait for three years letting all that human biology I've spent countless hours jamming into my head just pitter away? No sir! And so, I went to my first clinical today, for training as a CNA.

I'm attending a small, and very new private college about an hour away from home. The people who run it have good intentions, but the more time i spend there, the more I think the school is a joke. THe teachers often get into tangents reassuring us how awesome the school is, and how great the teachers are. Every time I go to class I am reminded that my teacher has been a CNA and a LVN for over 20 years, and how many houses she has and how awesome her life is, and how she could have moved on up the chain if she wanted to, but shes happy where shes at. Nothing wrong with that, but I dont need to here her brag about herrself for a half an hour each day when I could be learning about nursing! Super frustrating. Plus, she IS Saddam Hussein in South Park, you know, Satans lover?

I've hardly been able to sleep the past two nights. When I finally woke up this morning for the big day I wasn't as scared as I had anticipated, I was practically excited! I showed up 20 minutes early because im extremely anal about being on time, and of course I forgot my name badge at home which is ten minutes away and drove recklessly back home to grab it, and make it to the nursing home just as the teacher is pulling up. First chrisis averted.

My first time being in a nursing home was shocking. Especially after having just spent a while learning proper protocol to follow. I have heard bad things about this facility from friends who are emt's who drop by there every once in a while, but I wasn't really prepared for what I saw. CNAs waltzing in and out of Residents rooms without so much as an announcement let alone a knock. Complete disregard for the privacy that the residents deserve: A CNA is getting ready to give a shower, and doesn't even ask the woman if we can watch, just cheerily invites us a long even though it seems pretty obvious that the woman is uncomfortable with us there. And the chair that she was rolled to the shower room in had drops of blood on it, which gave me the creeps. After the shower, the CNA dressed the woman half way then just left her sitting on a really uncomfortable position with us standing there waiting for 20 minutes for her to come back ( we had been told not to actually do anything with the residents on our first day since we haven't been properly trained.) Eventually we said screw it and helped her get dressed and put her in her wheel chair where she was much more comfortable. Many of the CNA's would easily lose their temper with the residents and be extremely harsh and push the residents around too aggressively for me to be comfortable with, even when feeding them, they were just jamming food down these peoples throats as fast as they could. Maybe this is just how things go in a long term care facility and I will soon be jaded to this kind of behavior? I'm not sure. But when we got back to the classroom there were many complaints from all us students to the teacher, wondering if we should report the things we'd seen in our first clinical, like how they taught us in class. Our teacher said that we shouldn't report anything, but that she is going to try to get us transferred to a different facility.

As much as I am totally wigged out from the experience, it made me soooo grateful that my grandma died quickly and before she lost her independence, and that my grandpa is the most active old man ever, and is in pretty excellent health for an 80 year old. I feel blessed to not be condemned to spending the end of my days confined to one room. I also hope that I can make a difference in people lives who seem so bleak. But I'm totally worried about having to work with poop. I here i'll get over that pretty quickly though....