Weekend

This week went by so quickly, I can't even believe it! I'm constantly busy at work now. I have my schedule kind of nailed down into somewhat of a routine. On Mondays, I have an open time at 8:00 to see people who just got discharged from 5150s and have to get triaged for follow-up care. Then I have a scheduled intake from 9-11. I keep Monday afternoons open for testing cases. On Tuesdays, I have an open time in the morning to do crisis interventions and walk-in appointments. In the afternoon, I have a couple of individual appointments and then I have supervision. On Wednesdays, I have 8:00 open for crisis interventions, screenings, or crisis walk-ins then scheduled intake from 9-11. I have a child treatment team meeting from 11-12. In the afternoon, I have individual appointments and time to get paperwork done. Thursdays, I'm at the Perinatal clinic. I have supervision with Dr. Thorn at 8:00, then I'm in the clinic to see the girls come in with their babies, before the Co-Occurring group. Then I go into Co-Occurring Group but generally only stay for about 30 minutes before I start pulling people out who need individual appointments. I do 3 individual appointments before lunch. After lunch is the All-Staff/All-Client group. I can pull a couple of people out of it for individual sessions, if needed, or I stay in the group and help keep it to only mild chaos. The girls are done for the day at 3:00, but some of them have to do their urine tests, and it takes awhile for them to get the kids collected and ready to go. Then I have supervision with the clinic director Jane and do all my notes from my sessions that day (I don't note between sessions there, because I do 45 minute sessions with clients, back to back so that I can get 4 appointments in 3 hours, which leaves no time between for charting. Fridays are the intern day, and we have an hour of general internship business, then we have an hour for a case presentation, then we have two hours for a speaker/training session, and then we have our countertransference group and we're done. We have really great trainings, I have to say. This week, we had a training on narrative therapy, which was something I knew nothing about. I am not sure how well I could employ it at County, but it would be great in a college counseling center or private outpatient clinic where the clients are a little higher functioning!

I had some really difficult cases this week. Sometimes, honestly, I am sitting with clients, hearing all this stuff and I half-expect a cameraman to pop out and tell me I'm being filmed on Punk'd or something. Some of the things we hear are just unbelievable. Some are unbelievable because it's hard to believe all the shitty things that can happen to one person in one lifetime, and some are unbelievable because they are so crazy, you wonder how they ever made it into the building. I had a client this week who was an Ambassador for Jesus "which is a dangerous thing to be in this day and age," because the WORLD GOVERNMENT is run by Satanists, but he gets messages sent to him from the television from God through a headset implanted in his brain. However, the five voices he hears can also hear those messages and they are always threatening to tell the Satanist government about his missions, so he has to scramble the messages from God so they can't understand them. He has auditory, visual, tactile, and olfactory hallucinations. This person looked like a cross between the Unabomber and Charles Manson. What did I do with him? I took his story down, scheduled him with a triage appointment with our psychiatrist, made sure he got a nice big shot of Haldol, and sent him on his way. I also had a very nice, but quite severely mentally ill client who kept looking at the pictures on my wall. In between questions, he stands up to get a closer look at one of them. THen he said, "That guy [Ramy] looks really familiar. Is he a lawyer? Is he in the Pomona courthouse?" UN-BE-LIEVE-A-BLE.

Anyone who thinks we don't need a national healthcare overhaul with universally guaranteed coverage is completely welcome to come spend a day in my clinic.

One of the highlights of our week was that on Monday, we bought Rebecca a big girl bed! We didn't go to the store intending to buy it, so we didn't have the truck with us and Ramy had to go back and pick it up on Tuesday. We made the mistake of telling Rebecca that Ramy had gone to get her big girl bed, so when he got back, she was convinced it was going to be all set up and ready to go. So as to not disappoint our daughter, Ramy commenced with the assembling of said bed around 8:30. Of course, her crib was still up in her room, and there really isn't enough room to have them both up. So we had to get the crib out. The crib wouldn't fit through the door. Ramy took the door off its hinges so we could get it out the door and stash it in our room for the night. Of course, that would have necessitated taking another door off its hinges, which seemed ridiculous to us. Instead, he unscrewed the gate from the stairwell so we could take it (fully assembled) and move it down the stairs. We could then move the new bed (which had been assembled downstairs) upstairs and put it in place in Rebecca's room. At this point, it was well after 11 p.m., and I was quite cranky, since I'd awakened at 3:45 to take my mom to the airport that morning and had really been keen on an early bedtime. I'd like to say that Rebecca hopped into her new bed and we all fell asleep, but of course that would be too simple. She hopped into her bed, rooted around for awhile while we read stories, and tucked her baby dolls and favorite stuffed animals in with her. Then she hopped up and announced she wanted to go to bed...in our room, in our bed, of course! Since then, she starts out the night in her bed and eventually ends up in bed with us. Oh well, she won't want to do it when she's in high school, I'm pretty certain, so I'm not sweating it.