Only 8 days to go, hope you are excited.
Others have already talked about how to be a good CNA, and your course should prepare you with the basic skills.
There is an aspect to the work, especially if you work at a LTC, that the course does not prepare you for. For one, there is the difference between ideal, state-defined care, and then the reality of care. Sometimes people burn out emotionally because we cannot always provide the quality of care we want to provide. The line between what is acceptable and unacceptable to you is yours to find, within reason.
For example, I worked at a nursing home for a couple of years, working the night shift, 10pm to 6am. We were supposed to start our last round at 5 am, but the nurses let us start it at around 4:30, because during that last round each aide was supposed to change/check on 25-30 residents, take I/Os, pre-wash by hand the soiled linen (feces only), do flow sheets, and in the last 30 minutes, starting at 5:30am, dress and transfer 6-8 non-ambulatory residents into their wheelchairs and take them into the dining area (where they would then sit in their chairs for 90-120 minutes waiting for breakfast). And of course during all this chaos you had to answer call lights, as the nurses were too busy with med pass to help out (not that they would anyway, but at least in the morning they had an excuse).
Needless to say, in the 2+ years I worked at that facility, seeing a resident get their teeth brushed in the morning was a truly rare occasion. There simply, literally, was no time. So it's give and take... You have to overlook one aspect in favor of another.
Your course also may not prepare you for post-mortem care. I know the one I took didn't. They taught some about it in theory but we never got to actually practice it. And cleaning up your first dead person can be quite the experience. It's probably even more dramatic if you knew the resident well and liked them a lot. For some CNAs it's no big deal. For some others, even after years of working on the job, it never got easier. Me, I developed a very clinical approach to it. I put my heart into my social encounters with my residents, but once they passed away and it was left to me to clean them up, it didn't have much of a toll on me. The person is no longer there, it's just their shell. Doing a good job of taking care of that body, whether or not their family is on their way to see them, is the very last thing you can do for the resident. Do a good job, make it count.
The only thing I never really did get used to (well, there are more than one, you'd have to be heartless to simply get used to everything that goes on in a lot of LTCs - and to accept all those things) was when a mortician would pick up a body that had contracted legs. I remember being near a room of one resident who had passed away and his legs were contracted to where his legs were touching his thighs constantly. The mortician just forced the legs down, making a loud bone-cracking sound. I told my nurse about it and she just said "how else do you expect them to get him into the bag?". I mean, yes, it is just a body now, but it seemed so very...undignified. |