My favorite part of my A-days is wearing scrubs.
Everywhere I walk around campus people glance at me wondering why I am wearing unusual attire of a 17-year old teenager. The ones that are bold enough to ask me, find out that I am on the Dual Credit track to becoming a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA).
When I first applied for this class I honestly didn’t know what to expect besides the fact I got to wear scrubs. From past CNA students I knew that we went to the nursing home for the first semester and then rotated through various hospitals and fire stations for the second semester. While I applied for the class for the chance for hand-on patient interactions, I never realized what the hands-on activities would be.
In order to pass our CNA licensure program through Prometric we need to learn 22 skills. However, in the nursing homes and hospitals, we perform over 44 different skills. Before we visit the nursing homes though, we must learn the skills to perform them on the residents at the nursing homes. This meant that we learned and practiced the skills on our classmates.
Practicing skills on my classmates was fun. I got to lie in bed for 14 minutes in an occupied bed and transfer my classmate in and out of wheelchairs. However, this also meant that we performed foot care on one another and practiced feeding each other pudding. In a class of nine other girls, we ultimately ended up becoming really close.
Another thing I didn’t realize about CNA was how particular the uniform requirements were. Everyday in class we are expected to wear our navy blue scrubs with the Collin College Health Professions patch sewed to our left arm, our Collin College ID, a wristwatch with a second hand, white socks, and white shoes. We must also always have our hair tied back and a black pen in our pocket. Most importantly though, we aren’t allowed to have our phones during class. As a chronic phone addict, not having my phone for three and a half hours was initially the worst.
If we came to class without these pieces of our uniform, my teacher would make us complete the “walk of shame” which is where we must walk all the way downstairs, out of the CTE Center building, fix any part of our uniform we’re missing and then come back to class. While this was annoying at first, I soon understood my teacher’s importance on making sure we look prepared for when we go to nursing homes and then eventually hospitals.
Initially I didn’t realize what I would be doing in CNA, but this has been such a memorable experience and I’m excited to learn more as we start our rotations.
