Ode to the NA

Unofficially, I began clinical rotations last week. Yesterday I began working, officially. I'm at a tertiary hospital for eight hour shifts. At the moment, all of the MEPNs are shadowing nurse's aids, arguably the hardest working people in the hospital. The NA that I shadowed yesterday not only works an 8 hour day shift on one of the busiest floors of the hospital, but travels 30 miles to a skilled nursing facility where she works another 8 hour shift, 5 days per week. She was humble, informative, hard working, compassionate. As we were charting at the end of the day, we were looking through the chart at patient diagnoses. "Read this," she said of the doctor's notes, "you'll need to know it." If I had a diagnostic question, she'd answer it. As it turns out, she was licensed and practiced as an RN in Manila. She's now practicing at home (in her spare time, whenever that can possibly be) to take the NCLEX here in California. And that, my friends, is much, much harder work than MEPN.