I worked bedside for the better part of a decade. Six years, 11 months and 15 days.
Being a CNA helped to feed and clothe my children. It gave me rent money, grocery money, and the ability to try and save. Being a CNA allowed to appreciate the work my mother did for 40 years as an Registered Nurse.
Aside: SHOUT OUT TO BLACK NURSES, BECAUSE BLACK NURSES MATTER!
In working Long-term care, Acute care, Geriatrics, Med-Surg, and telemetry and neurology (heart and brain), I have seen all types of people, from all walks of life, in pain and elevated from pain. I am used to having to suit up to go into rooms for people with wounds. Or AIDS. Or Tuberculosis. Or COVID.
Yet, to go to the grocery store? That hits different.
There is a divide that you have as a clinician that you believe that you can just leave at work! In having that divide being broken, so severely, to the point that the same things, the same trainings, that you may use to get through a 8h, 12h, 16h shift?
You have to begin to wonder–out loud?!–what the hell is going on?
The Ideal Firestarter 