Taking the CES-A exam started out a little rough. The deal is that they email you a personalized link and password to log in to the test, then you just log in from a computer and away you go. It is a proctored exam but fortunately the proctor was someone I had worked closely with for years at a previous job so he was tolerant of the shenanigans that I went through before the test.
The difficulty started when I couldn’t find the email with the link and password to take the test. I dug through all my email accounts, all my trash folders and all my spam folders with no luck. I knew I had received the email because I remembered looking at it and specifically thinking that I needed to save it and not throw it away but I could not find it anywhere. Looked in all my personal accounts and my work account and nothing. Fortunately there is a help line number to call, which I did and left a message. To the testing organization’s credit, they called back pretty quickly and the problem was identified easily. Somehow I had managed to give them the email address that I use exclusively for paying utility bills; gas, electric, internet, all that. The only explanation that I have is that my browser must have auto-filled that address when I was filling out the testing application and I just didn’t notice. I hadn’t checked that email account because it never occurred to me that I would have used it but once I checked it, there was the link and the password. Phew.
As happens most times when I take multiple choice tests, I managed to zip through the questions pretty quickly and, also like most times when I take multiple choice tests, I was absolutely sure that I was getting every single one wrong.
At the end, I did manage to pass with 88% which I feel pretty good about having gone in cold with absolutely no preparation. I could have done better if I had studied since there were a good handful of questions about things that we had consciously decided to not do when we were putting together the protocols and procedures for our ECMO program. Getting into the details on that would take a lot of arm waving and a lot of pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, which I’m happy to do but I can’t imagine it would be particularly interesting to anyone who isn’t a total nerd about mechanical circulatory support. I will say, though, that the questions did reinforce, in my mind, that we had made the correct decision when we chose to not monitor the parameters that they were asking about on the test. It’s kind of neat but it doesn’t really contribute anything to the safety or efficacy of the treatment and it is very likely to just cause angst and confusion on a day-to-day or hour-to-hour basis so we really felt it was better to skip it in our program.
So the final outcome is that I get a $1 raise as a certification bonus and I can now add CES-A after my name and, as anyone who works in healthcare knows, the only really important thing is how many letters you have after your name.
(Not really though. In fact I find it uniquely annoying when people add every degree and credential they have after their names. it makes them look like they’re trying to compensate for something. I’ll just stick with plain and simple RN, thanks.)
