Housekeepers and Janitors Need Praise As Unsung but Very Much Important
Remember when the NRA told doctors to “stay in their lane” RE gun violence and #thisismylane trended as a result?
One of the tweets I saw was a surgeon who’d taken a picture of her OR, having just finished surgery on a young man who’d been shot. Blood. Everywhere.
This bloke retweeted her, mentioning that he worked as a cleaner in a hospital and had had to clean up stuff like this and worse.
Surgeon replied to him (and went up *greatly* in my estimation) and, despite living in different countries, thanked him for his hard work.
I can’t find the tweets sadly, but hers went something like;
“Without a clean and sterile operating room to work in, my team, our skills and the best medicines in the world are next to useless. You are doing invaluable work, without which my work would be impossible.”
I work as a nurse, and a huge amount of the care credited to us is actually certified nursing assistants, or CNAs (or “techs”). These are the folks who do a huge amount of the grunt work of cleaning up poop, changing dirty linens, feeding people, getting folks up to the chair and back to the bed, back and forth to and from the bathroom, etc, and they get paid, like, half of what we do.
I never see “CNA Appreciation Week” or “we love our CNAs” or people talking about how amazing our techs are.
God bless our CNAs. And housekeeping. And janitors, and supply staff, and sanitation workers, and all those folks doing the grunt work of making sure we’re not living in filth.
