CNA School

In 2004, Corrie and I went to CNA school together. As we started class in the spring of that year, we were full of optimism and cute as buttons in our beautiful scubs that our moms made for us. Little did we know how completely terrifying it would be! Our first encounter with patients of any kind were an elderly couple, both had to be in there 80's. They shared a room with each other in the nursing home and we were told to help them get up and ready for breakfast. Seems simple enough, right? Well, for starters, the wife had bilateral amputations above the knee and I was supposed to help her put on her prosthetic legs. We hadn't exactly gone over that in Nurses Aide 101! And I had to empty my first bedpan! I nearly puked and spent the next half-hour hiding in the hall. Corrie decided that she never wanted to get old and was pretty sure that she didn't want to be a nurse's aide, much less a nurse.
 We manged to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and by the end of our 2 month clinical rotation, we were passing trays and dressing the elderly like nobody's business. I would say about 99% of the time, we didn't go anywhere in that nursing home without the other one. We were completely co-dependent! We both got our licences after passing the state board exam the first time around. We relied on each other so much during CNA school and we continued to rely on the other one during nursing school.
Even though Corrie wasn't standing beside me when I put my first foley catheter in or started my first IV, I knew she had done it already and it sucked just as much for her as it was sucking for me right now. And I knew that when I got home I would be able to get on instant messenger and tell her all about it as we played backgammon. I would listen to Corrie in awe as she described watching her first open heart surgery and I laughed at her when she told me about one of the many times she made a fool of herself in front of her patients. I would rejoice for her when she passed another test with a fantastical 99, and dread my NCLEX after hearing her describe the horrendous test.
It's hard to believe we both are licensed professionals when I think back to our humble beginnings but here we are, and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have survived the entire ordeal without Nurse Corrie!