My Health Care Days

People like to tell a joke whenever you're looking for work: try health care! There are always sick people!

The year I was engaged to my now ex-wife, I heard that joke a lot. I had been working at a factory in the final assembly department for building gas meters. It gave me permanent soreness with temporary numbness and tingling in both arms (my doctor tells me it's not carpal tunnel but it's similar. Outlook and treatment is also the same).

Coupling that with our plant constantly sustaining mass layoffs and I was looking for something more sustainable in a career.

I was told by a friend that their fiance was working at a nursing home. Not only were they hiring but they would pay you while they provided training. They offered me a job shadowing session to make sure I could handle the daily work. While I said I absolutely could (I wanted out of that factory job), the smell of human waste stayed in my clothes from that first day for a week.

Still, I took the job and got used to the smell, among other things.

Really, when you take care of people at the end of their lives, you have to get used to a lot.

They need cleaned up after using the bathroom, they need bathed, they need fed, they need calmed down when they get aggressive, they need put to bed.

They even need their bodies treated with care and respect after they die.

I was on a wing that held 18 residents when I started. When I left a year later, only two of the original residents were still alive. In fact, my favorite two passed away the last month I was there.

I took a job at the hospital where my wife also worked. I thought it would be a better environment so that I wouldn't get attached so easily to the patients.

While this was mostly true, you still do get attached to certain patients. You also have similar tasks from the nursing home, especially the post mortum care. This wasn't as bad when I was on one of the floors as to when I transferred to the ER.

The ER did provide me with a faster pace to help the day go faster (12 hour shifts, four days per week) but also led to a tougher, wider workload. It also led to more conflicts with my coworkers.

You see, when you're a CNA (or HCA or PCT or whichever initials your facility chooses to use), the RNs have a habit of looking down on you. They see themselves as highly paid and trained medical professionals while you're nothing more than a glorified ass-wiper (one said as much to me).

So, there was always simmering tension between the RNs and CNAs. They'd call you from whatever task you were performing to clean their rooms or unhook patients from their blood pressure cuffs to take them to the bathroom or out to their car or whatever they wanted you to do for them. All of this was so they could sit around and chart faster.

Not all of the RNs abused this privilege but too many did. While I did my job, I wasn't always the quickest or nicest to these RNs.

Sadly, I also didn't endure myself to the good RNs either all the time. I was in my twenties and still had a large sense of entitlement. Why I felt this way, I have no idea. But I would either tell insulting jokes that only I found funny or act like I was better than them or just be a major jerk for no good reason. It's no wonder why none of them ever talk to me anymore. I wouldn't speak to the me from back then either, honestly.

Still, I had a job to do and I did the best I could. However, the workload absolutely got to me. You work on patients going through cardiac arrest or other medical emergencies and you can't bring them back, it starts to mess with your psyche. I worked on (and lost) patients of every age, race, and creed during my tenure in the ER. Even the few that we could save didn't have a great prognosis after we sent them off to the ICU.

Having to move on from one of those situations into my usual workload would make me feel schizophrenic. I'd work on a cardiac arrest, clean them up when we couldn't save them, immediately have to go help an RN with an IV on a toddler, go splint a n elderly patient's broken arm, to helping a doctor suture another one's lacerated scalp, to watching a psych patient have a mental breakdown in an empty room before the ambulance came to take them to a mental health facility, to trying to clean room in between, to trying to eat, to constantly getting calls from the RNs for every menial task in the building. Rinse and repeat for 12 hours (more if the ER waiting room was full). Four days a week (more if they asked you to come in if someone called off). 52 weeks a year. For over three years.

Looking back, I'm amazed I lasted as long, mentally, as I did. Really, I should've sought out therapy sooner but I thought that would make me a bigger failure than I already felt in life. Talking to my wife was no option as she always put herself on the cross for every situation.

This led to me taking a job in a different department and getting fired after only a month (as I described in my post "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"). I figured that was it for me in health care as well as any decent job ever again.

But the universe has a sense of irony.

During COVID, an opportunity came up for me to return to the medical field as a medical scribe. At the same hospital. In the same ER.

Essentially, I'd follow the doctors around and type up their notes on each patient into the computer system. Their symptoms, the exam review, the test results, the diagnosis and prognosis.

I did this for approximately six months before a registration job came up. I took it immediately as the pay and benefits were much better. For each job, I always made sure to mention having been fired previously and why. Neither department had an issue with it (or at least none were stated directly to me). I think because I was open and honest about what had happened then it was okay with them. I'm sure I was monitored closely though to make sure I didn't do anything similar again.

I finally left the hospital behind approximately three years ago for a much better job outside of healthcare. There's no chance of me going back, although I did leave this time on my own, excellent terms.

The things I saw, felt, and experienced, I can't take back or forget. All I can do is move forward and use what I've seen and done to shape me into a better person.

I'm at least thankful that the worst parts of those jobs don't haunt my dreams.

Anymore.