Tweet round-up

Real bloggers do this, sometimes, don't they? I think the Bloggess does. She calls it phoning it in. Anyway, here are some of my most recent tweets for those of you who don't have the pleasure of subscribing to my brilliance there.

• March 25th: I feel genuinely excited to be about to clean my bathroom with lemon comet while I listen to an EMT podcast. 30 isn't too different from 29.
• March 26th: PT [physical therapy]asked me to come help push a guy's leg and then when I did it went kablooey and sprayed blood. And I didn't faint!
• April 7th: My shift is half over and very boring, I'm watching an old man watch baseball.
• April 8th: My confused elderly patient told me our relationship won't work if I don't stop lying to him & pretending we're at the hospital.
• April 15th: Hospital riddle: you're working a double and get a 1:1 for a confused impulsive fall risk old man. What word do you least want to hear him say when you walk into the room? ...My real answer (and what he said) = Vietnam. Other contenders?
• April 27th: What should I watch on VHS, crossroads or 3 men and a baby?
• April 29th: I'm still sick. Wheen I finally get better I have a new life goal: pinup girl gator wrestling queen. Seriously, I like Louisiana, waterproof makeup, alligators and crocodiles in general and I could dust off the fisticuffs.
• today: OMG I just got to cut off a patient's undies for the first time: today is AWESOME!!

Day 4: Hell yeah I have a J-O-B

Day 4 -Do you have a job? If you do, what is it and do you like it? If not, what job would you like to have?

I have a job or two. Actually, technically I have three: I'm a CNA and a Med Aide at my facility, and I work in homecare on the side on-call.

I like my jobs. My favorite is working as a med aide, although that's the most stressful because I'm expected to juggle a wide variety of responsibilities as I'm doing my primary duties. But it's the most fun, too. My regular CNA days working the floor are usually fine. There's a few residents and coworkers I don't like dealing with, but that comes with the territory, right? And homecare is a mixed bag; it tends to be either spectacularly easy and pleasant (am I really getting paid? Right now?? To sleep in a bed in a waterfront condo and wake up for q3hr turns?? WOW!) or horrible and making me rethink my life choices (I drove all the way out here to BFE to take care of a woman in this filthy scary house and her son is showing me how to stand her up and telling me not to "play with her butt"? I clearly took a wrong turn somewhere in my past to end up here. For the next 6 hours. If I ever survive this and get home again.)

If I didn't want to work in healthcare, other jobs I would enjoy:

1. Vacuum technician at a vacuum cleaner store. I loooooooove tinkering with vacuum cleaners and seeing all the different kinds that exist in the world. I did hours of research before buying each of my (2) vacuums that I've ever owned as an adult. I can change the belts, clear clogs, etc. in no time flat. I'd be so enthusiastic about this job, I bet I'd get tips.

2. Mortician. Turns out I'm not at all afraid of dead bodies. And I'm getting better at telling family members bad news every day.

3. Working for the phone or power company to be one of those people that climbs up the phone poles or goes up in a cherry-picker to work on the transformers and to cut back tree branches that are threatening to knock down the lines. I like heights, and like being outdoors, and would like learning to work with electronics, probably.

4. Police officer. I haven't done any of this, although I did intern at a couple of juvenile detention centers and used to work with frequently incarcerated teenage boys. I can be authoritative and set clear boundaries, and am not one to panic when a violent situation breaks out. I think I'd really enjoy feeling like I was serving and protecting those that needed it, but then again, most people that get arrested are usually really, really annoying - trashy, long-winded, refuse to accept responsibility, etc. Also, just because I can keep calm during an emergency doesn't mean I'm not disturbed by it later. Like when one of my boys stabbed the other through the arm with a fork at the dinner table. Yuck.

All in all, I'm happy where I'm at. I never, ever want to work a desk job. I want to be up moving around and using my hands.

Crossing the line

The other day, in between shifts, I stopped at a fast food restaurant for a rice and bean burrito. Tasty! Since the home I was headed to doesn't have any toilets without "hats" in them to collect urine, I figured I'd better use the bathroom there. I walked in and was hit with that cloying, suffocating smell, and instead of thinking "Oh gross, jeez!" like a normal person, I thought "Oh! It smells just like Mrs. So-and-So's bathroom! Does someone in here have an ostomy bag?". Then I saw that one of the stalls had an out of order sign on it and probably something ungodly was in there.

That's when I knew I'd crossed the line and would never have a normal sense of what is and isn't disgusting again. I think it's inevitable when you spend your days toileting, changing, bathing and all around dealing with sick and elderly people.

It takes something really beyond the pale to get to me anymore, and if something does manage to grab my attention through sheer revulsion on my part, it's probably making me laugh at the same time.

So in no particular order, here's the short list of things I still get grossed out by. It's not for the squeamish!

1. Changing a brief or doing peri-care on a male who has a "#3" in there. If you're not familiar with this term, use your imagination. It's not a #1 or #2, although the presence of either or both of these increases the horror exponentially. Nope, a #3 is the other thing that can exit the urethra. Yep. Ew.

2. Poop on the shower floor. Something about the wet plopping sound and the way the steam just turns it into a vaporizer of fecality that will have you longing for Vicks or anything strong and mentholated to coat your nasal passages in. And the cleanup is a real bastard.

3. The smell of old, stale urine, especially if the urinator has a UTI or has been drinking alcohol. You wouldn't think it could possibly smell as strongly as poop, but it sure can.

4. The smell of blood mixed with any of the preceding three ickies. Adding in the smell of blood to any of those is the only thing that currently makes me gag and dry heave immediately.

What about you all, which of these is the grossest to you? If anyone says "none" and means it, you deserve a bronzed section of intestine to show what a strong stomach you have.

See, it stuff like this that makes healthcare workers into a subculture. No one else wants to hear about this junk, let alone thinks it's as funny as we do!

Oh, Gross!

When I tell people what I do for a living now, a lot of them get hung up on the fact that I wipe butts and change adult diapers. I get asked "Do you have a really strong stomach?" (answer: no) and "Is that the worst part?" (again: no). It's just like anything else; you get used to it. It's just another task that needs to be done, and it's one that has a pretty obvious correlation to whether my patient is comfortable and healthy or not. Would you be feeling good sitting in a soaking wet diaper? Would it be fun for you to no longer be able to get up and go to the bathroom when you need to? Of course not. So by handling those things promptly, I improve someone's quality of life instantly. Not bad, really.

Besides, I'm a blood phobic, so anything involving blood is approximately 8,000,000times worse in my mind than any poop, vomit or urine could be. Blood makes me faint, usually. I mean really faint. Out cold, hitting my head on the way down type of fainting. Yikes.

So you can imagine how anxious I was when one of my clients had to have his toenail removed recently. Completely gone. Double yikes.

He got home with a sheet of instructions that read "soak foot for 10 min daily, loosely apply bandaid, can use small amount of antiobiotic ointment if needed". Wow, thanks for the hints about what I'm going to see under the weird blue gauze you packed him in, doc. Scribbled on a prescription notepad was the additional "for first treatment, remove bandage first. If dressing sticks, use peroxide to loosen."

Oh. Okay. Bandage sticking to never before exposed skin?? That can't be fun.

I got my client settled, got all my supplies lined up, and gloved up. Oh my lord, how I love disposable gloves. I cannot imagine doing this job without them. The first nurses were SAINTS to do what they did, and to do it bare-handed.

I gently began removing the dressing from this poor man's foot, and blood really started flowing. Like dripping-onto-the-carpet flowing. Crap! I got that bandaging off as fast as I could and dunked his foot into the little basin of water, which immediately began looking as if a shark attack had taken place. My client was woozy at this point, and shut his eyes, claiming to be too much of a "sissy" to look. Me too, buddy. Me too.

Luckily the bleeding stopped after a few minutes in the water, and after a very messy dry-off, the beast was safely bandaged up again. Ew.

I left that apartment a little woozy myself, and vowing to inspect my own feet every night for the rest of my life so I never, EVER have to have that done on myself. But you know what? I did it! I dealt with a bleeding wound without fainting, vomiting, or freezing up. I'm awesome! I'm brave! I'm a nursing assistant rockstar!

I'd also still prefer a diaper to that, no contest. Especially one as aptly named as this ...



That's right, buddies, me and the disposable briefs? We'll prevail!