Top Four Lessons Learned as a CNA

This week I will finish up CNA (Certified Nurse Assistant) training which means, after I take the state exam, I can legally change your diaper should you come to Illinois and need one.

CNA training is required for some of the nursing schools in Chicago, so wisdom (and sage advice) said to cast my net wide, gain some basic clinical experience, and go through this basic training before actually applying to nursing school.  During my four weeks in training both in class and in a nursing home I learned so many things.  My top FOUR are ...drumroll please.

4. No matter how diverse a group of people are gathered (or forced by necessity) to share a room or an experience...like will find like. 

 The 'like' is often racially defined but more often I found the lines are drawn based on education.  The college educated will gravitate to the college educated.  The less educated sometimes shun the more educated in a kind of reverse discrimination.  I swear, go to any Career Training Center in a major metropolitan area and you have a sociological PhD thesis before you.

3. Your attitude toward what happens to you and to the way you see your work makes a difference not only in the personal contentment you will feel in life but the contentment those around you will feel.  

The past four Saturdays I worked in an urban nursing home shadowing a CNA and doing their work.  I worked with a lot of different personalities- mostly young black women who have not been handed every opportunity on a silver platter.  There were some who did the bare minimum, who treated the residents like a paycheck or limp doll for which they needed to care.  And then there was Asia.  Asia is paying her way through nursing school by working as a CNA.  Asia works very hard and taught me what it looks like to love the bedridden, the forgotten, the helpless with love and compassion.  Asia told me, "You gotta work for the One who is always with you.  You gotta loves these residents with His love, because even if no one is watchin' you...He is.  They're people too.  Love 'em like you'd want to be loved."  Asia is going to be an amazing nurse.

2. Love can happen in the most unlikely of places. 

 Yesterday I met Gayle and Will.  They are two residents of Peterson Park Nursing home.  Gayle and Will met in the hall while waiting for physical therapy in their wheelchairs. They married in the facility's dining room complete with "the prettiest blue balloons you ever did see."  Gayle told me, "Honey, I have never been in love before.  I saw Will doing his crossword and I got butterflies in my stomach.  Sure enough butterflies like some young teenager.  You should have seen our wedding in the dining room. It was real nice."

1. LIFE IS NOT FAIR  

I think if I came away with anything from this experience it is that life is not fair.  Many of the residents at Peterson Park are very old.  They are in their final days of living rich full lives- raising families, working as lawyers, starting nonprofits for wayward youth, the list goes on.  But some of them are not old.  My favorite resident- I'll call him J.R.- is only fifty years old.  I finally asked him yesterday what happened to him.  He told me he had a brain tumor at age 17 that first made him blind, then took away some of his normal bodily functions, and affected his brain in lasting and permanent ways.  "I just got off the bus one day coming home from school, and I didn't recognize anything around me," JR told me.  "A few days later I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Doctor said I had a 50/50 chance of losing my eyesight.   Well, I guess you can see how that turned out," he said plainly.  It isn't fair.  It isn't fair that I get to go home to my husband, children, and albeit transitionary...house, while he spends night after night in a plastic covered bed in Room 137.  And the thing about JR that was so amazing is that the most I ever heard him complain was about his eggs being a little runny.  He made me smile, and I'm thankful that I learned how to be more natural around a bedridden person because of JR.