Fired for what now?

One time, at a summer job I had for a fast food joint that, if you live in the U.S., I promise you've been to (or at least driven past), I was the cash register jockey -- handing walkins their food, taking their money, and cleaning up after people when they were finished eating.

A girl comes in, orders an astounding number of chicken nuggets and then goes for her purse to pay me. Except she's not wearing a purse. She's just kind of groping at her side for a while, and she finally tells me she'll be back in a minute; she's got to go outside and get her purse from the car. She had kind of a glazed look on her face, so I figured she was on drugs or something, but I wasn't expecting what came next.

The guys in the back dropped all her chicken nuggets--nine or ten orders--and she came back in with a brown paper sack, which she pours onto the counter. It's a mess of loose change.

But as she dumped it, she fell over herself. Just collapsed like a human rag doll. I freaked out and the manager called an ambulance.

Because I was in school to be a nurse, I had CPR trainining, and my head had time to clear, so I checked her pulse and her breathing--pulse, check. Breathing, nope.

And I start doing the thing where you cover the person's nose and breath into her mouth.

What they don't fucking tell you in CPR training is that if you get someone started breathing again, they can cough and vomit right into your goddamn mouth.

The ambulance guys told me I probably saved her life, and the highly recommended that I go get all kinds of fun testing to make sure that, in reward for getting her lungs working again, I hadn't picked up some kind of nightmarish hell-plague.

Oh, and I got fired the next day, both for "making a scene" in the lobby and for product waste. See, I sent the chicken nuggets with her in the ambulance ride (she regained conciousness and all, but was clearly sick.) but I'd never bothered counting the change she'd dumped onto the counter, which as it turns out, wasn't nearly enough to cover all the chicken nuggets she'd bought.

Moral of the story? If you work in fast food, never do anything nice, ever. People will puke down your throat and then fire you.

The Day I Walked Into Hell

Back in 2006, I worked as a nursing assistant in Kansas for an agency that would send me to places that needed extra staff. For the most part, this was a good job. I'd heard horror stories about agency staff, and horror stories about nursing homes, but for four months nothing bad ever happened.

Then I was sent to a state-run nursing home in [redacted]. If you're not a nurse or a nursing assistant, you need some context before you can understand how disgusting what I encountered was, both viscerally and emotionally. Nursing assistants on a day shift, back when I worked, would have 12 patients at a time, which was usually divided additionally among 3 or 4 nurses. Once you got used to it, it was more than a reasonable load. For each of these patients, the nursing assistant is responsible for helping them use the toilet (or preventing / cleaning up messes), bathing them, feeding them, getting their vital signs, helping them move from one place to another, helping them get dressed or undressed, and helping them get up and down out of bed and (usually) into a wheelchair. It's hard work, but most of the nurses and other CNAs I've met, even when we didn't get along, were really good about putting the patients first.

More than 12 patients on a dayshift gets really bad, really fast. Days when I got somewhere to find that I had (for whatever reason) 15 or 16 patients instead were hellish, because it usually meant that there were fewer people to help out. On a night shift, a nursing assistant will usually have more, but since the patients are usually asleep, the work is less intense. The responsibilities beyond keeping the patients clean are usually custodial--keeping the supply room stocked, keeping the linen racks stocked, making sure the laundry is done--each facility is different, and agency aids have to be willing to change job descriptions on a dime.

When I got to the state-run nursing home for my night shift, I had 36 patients. The hallways I was responsible for reeked of feces and urine. No one gave me report--whoever had worked before had left before I'd gotten there, meaning that for God-only-knows how long, 36 patients in a nursing home had had no one helping them.

There was one nurse. She spent the evening watching television and doing paperwork. I spent a 12-hour shift cleaning feces and urine off of immobile human beings non-stop, and when I explained to the nurse that I needed help, she accused me of being "just another lazy agency aide." In other words, I was on my own.

Cleaning shit off of a person is physically and emotionally taxing. The person is usually humiliated, even if they're somewhat used to it, and nine times out of ten, if they can't get out of bed to avoid going all over themselves, they can't move around too well. CNAs usually work in pairs to clean heavier patients; one CNA lifts, the other cleans. I was alone. I was forced to precariously balance the patients against my 120-pound frame and clean both patient and bed one-handed from an awkward position.

About half-way through my shift, tired from lifting people twice my weight and then scrubbing, I went to find the nurse--still "doing paperwork" in front of the television, and tore into her. She tore right back, with this alien conviction that the patient charts she were writing in were somehow more important than the patients themselves.

I don't know or care why she was writing in those charts without actually having gone into the patients' rooms.

I've never been to a nursing home that bad before or since.

When I finished the shift, the secretary at my agency told me I'd been DNR'd--meaning that no matter how bad that nursing home's staff problems got, they'd never use me again.

Thank God.