I was a nurse’s assistant for twenty years. It’s literally a shit job. I’ve had every single body fluid on me, and in some cases it happened on purpose, including someone shitting on my neck because he thought I was the guy that fucked his wife thirty years before.
I’ve been wrist deep in infected wounds. I’ve seen people’s spine and hips without an x-ray because there was no flesh left on top of the bones. I’ve had people die in front of me, sometimes just dropping, other times taking days to die in slow pain. I’ve washed the dead bodies afterwards.
I’ve been groped by men and women (and not in uneven numbers surprisingly) despite being a sasquatch.
I’ve been shit-canned because companies wanted to cut insurance for employees, because a facility was too cheap to give a dime raise that I had dared to ask for, and once because I wouldn’t fuck one of the nurse supervisors. Seriously.
I’ve been in a facility that lost 2/3 or their residents over two weeks because one fucking asshole of an administrator refused to let staff with the flu take time off, and it ripped through the fucking place. In that two weeks, half of the staff just fucking quit because they were either too sick to care, or just got burnt out, so I was covering up to about seventy patients by myself with a single RN in charge of three halls full of dying patients.
I once got in a fucking fight with another NA because I caught him trying to fuck a patient, and wanted to try and cook to an excuse why he was there with a boner, his pants down, and climbing on top of the patient and didn’t like being pulled off and thrown to the floor.
I once had a patient lost in dementia that seemed to think everyone was a demon sent to torture her because that’s what she called us while she screamed in pain because just turning her over in bed to change her diaper could tear her skin. One night, I ended up just walking out the door and not coming back for a week. Which should tell you how fucking horrible nursing homes treat people that they were so desperate for staff that I could get away with that. When I did come back, it was because I wanted to turn in some gear I had been wearing that wasn’t mine, but they just asked if I was quitting, or if they could put me back on the schedule.
You know what’s fucked up though? Sometimes I still miss the good parts of the job. Watching people die sucked, but knowing I was making that a little easier was fucking gold. Helping a patient go from bedbound, to using a chair, to using a walker, to using a cane was fucking awesome. Seeing a wound that was this big, gnarly, infected hole close up over months and being the one that was doing the hands on care that got it closed up was satisfying in a way I never manage to adequately describe.
It wasn’t all bad. I can’t even say that the bad was such a high percentage of the overall job that I regret having done it. But it’s a shitty enough job that anyone that ever asks gets advised to not do it
Oh, fucking hell, I have to pick one as worst?
I was a nurse’s assistant for twenty years. It’s literally a shit job. I’ve had every single body fluid on me, and in some cases it happened on purpose, including someone shitting on my neck because he thought I was the guy that fucked his wife thirty years before.
I’ve been wrist deep in infected wounds. I’ve seen people’s spine and hips without an x-ray because there was no flesh left on top of the bones. I’ve had people die in front of me, sometimes just dropping, other times taking days to die in slow pain. I’ve washed the dead bodies afterwards.
I’ve been groped by men and women (and not in uneven numbers surprisingly) despite being a sasquatch.
I’ve been shit-canned because companies wanted to cut insurance for employees, because a facility was too cheap to give a dime raise that I had dared to ask for, and once because I wouldn’t fuck one of the nurse supervisors. Seriously.
I’ve been in a facility that lost 2/3 or their residents over two weeks because one fucking asshole of an administrator refused to let staff with the flu take time off, and it ripped through the fucking place. In that two weeks, half of the staff just fucking quit because they were either too sick to care, or just got burnt out, so I was covering up to about seventy patients by myself with a single RN in charge of three halls full of dying patients.
I once got in a fucking fight with another NA because I caught him trying to fuck a patient, and wanted to try and cook to an excuse why he was there with a boner, his pants down, and climbing on top of the patient and didn’t like being pulled off and thrown to the floor.
I once had a patient lost in dementia that seemed to think everyone was a demon sent to torture her because that’s what she called us while she screamed in pain because just turning her over in bed to change her diaper could tear her skin. One night, I ended up just walking out the door and not coming back for a week. Which should tell you how fucking horrible nursing homes treat people that they were so desperate for staff that I could get away with that. When I did come back, it was because I wanted to turn in some gear I had been wearing that wasn’t mine, but they just asked if I was quitting, or if they could put me back on the schedule.
You know what’s fucked up though? Sometimes I still miss the good parts of the job. Watching people die sucked, but knowing I was making that a little easier was fucking gold. Helping a patient go from bedbound, to using a chair, to using a walker, to using a cane was fucking awesome. Seeing a wound that was this big, gnarly, infected hole close up over months and being the one that was doing the hands on care that got it closed up was satisfying in a way I never manage to adequately describe.
It wasn’t all bad. I can’t even say that the bad was such a high percentage of the overall job that I regret having done it. But it’s a shitty enough job that anyone that ever asks gets advised to not do it
I’ve had a taste of that life and it’s not for the faint of heart. Thank you for everything you did.