A crazy week

It has been a really hectic week here for all of us.

On Monday, Rebecca and I went to free play at Gymboree, cleaned house, and I made some stuff for us to have for dinner during the week. On Tuesday, I was at Casa Colina, and it was a madhouse. On my schedule, I needed to see three of our elderly patients in our SEP program. Each of those included a 2 hour assessment, as well as the interview and chart review. Plus time to score their test results and write up their reports. The SEP program is such that the patients come in on Sunday or Monday and get evaluated all during the week. There's a conference on them on Friday morning, and so obviously the evals have to be done by then. I worked late on Tuesday night working on that.

Then on Wednesday, I had just about the craziest day of my professional career. The morning started off with me giving feedback to one of my patients I tested a few weeks ago, and her husband. It's a hard thing to have to tell people that we just don't know how much recovery is possible from such severe damage. It's a fine line to walk between not wanting to give anyone reason to lose hope but also not giving them unrealistically high expectations. That was a difficult feedback session. Then I co-led a brain injury education group with my supervisor for our lower functioning brain injury patients. The topic was on how emotions are different after brain injuries. In the group, we had several behavior plan patients, who don't get along. Well, there was a reason we'd chosen that particular topic - because all of these people have difficulty with anger management, impulse control, and most forms of socially appropriate behavior. To make a long story short, we ended up having a melee in the group. There were chairs thrown, glasses broken, blood flying, references to Forrest Gump, and general mayhem, resulting in us calling security. My role in this was trying to get the helpless bystanders out of harms way. Needless to say, future attempts to have group psychoeducation for this group have been reconsidered. That afternoon, I did a pretty complicated assessment of a woman who'd had three strokes. The highlight of the day was that I got my student evaluation from the faculty of the deparment of Psychology at LLU. It was pretty glowing, so I was happy. Of course, it had the note in there that I couldn't apply for internship until my comp paper was passed and I'd defended my dissertation proposal, but that was already a given.

Thursday, Nanny Rebecca was off, so I had Miss Rebecca with me. We had a full day, and she was an angel. We drove to Casa Colina to my office to drop off the Tuesday evals. Then we hit the freeway and drove to Loma Linda, where I had to conduct supervision for one of my assessment students. Then we walked over to the other side of campus to pick up something from the IRB office. Next, we drove over to the University of Redlands to see how my dissertation study is going and to pick up the new signed consent forms (8 more participants enrolled - yay!). Then we went back to Loma Linda to drop something off. And then we finally headed home. That night, we went to the L.A. County Fair (see post below).

Ramy starts his murder trial week after next, so he went in to the office yesterday, even though it was his 9/80 and for a few hours this morning. We're both a little stressed with all we have going on. I'm anxious for my dissertation chair to give me the news that I passed (please, God) my comp paper and feedback on my dissertation proposal so that I can go ahead and set the date for my proposal defense. I'm also working on dissertation applications. It is very frustrating for this to be out of my hands, and it ramps up my anxiety. It is one thing to be stressed because of all I have to do in the process, but for it to be in other people's hands makes it so much worse. Get the lead out, people! Surprisingly, a new potential site opened up this week. There's a private outpatient psych clinic with offices in Chino, Upland, and Claremont that has joined the APPIC program. Hello, the Chino office is five minutes from my house! It isn't accredited by APA, so that knocks it down for me, but I'll apply and hopefully will get an interview and will see if it looks like it would be good experience. I'm forcing myself to not try to pin my hopes on certain sites already. I'm trying to not rank my preferences until after interviews.

My mom comes to visit next Thursday evening and will be here until the following Tuesday. We all are looking forward to that. We'll be going to our church's harvest festival and who knows what else. I'd hoped that we'd be able to celebrate me proposing my dissertation, but apparently that isn't going to happen before then. And then just a couple of weeks later, we'll be heading to Tennessee for vacation for a week. We can't wait!