Oh, You Have No Idea

Monday:

Lecture finished up today. Next week is the final. I still have to finish up the clinical part of the term, but that's not so bad. We put in 96 clinical hours in five weeks, which followed the 96 we put in over the eight weeks previous.

I'm tired.

Dave and I went out to the studio over the weekend and I threw one cup and Dave glazed one thing and the rest of the time we played with Buzz. He and Dave are very happy playing together and Judi is happy that Buzz is tired out and will sleep all night.

Thursday:

Another week of clinicals down. Thank god. I'm so exhausted.

Today I worked on an adult unit, which housed two murderers (one was discharged today), one aggressive schizophrenic, and two incredibly violent  and abusive patients with a host of mental problems. Fun stuff. It was not all card playing and art therapy today. It was very One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with IM haldol for everyone who stepped up.

Yes, they have a mental illness, but in some cases, it is a mental illness layered on top of being a shit person. Usually I try to be sympathetic to the people who are on the unit, but today, there were so many people there who were just shitty human beings with violently criminal tendencies compounded with mental illness--and I honestly would have had no qualms, ethical or otherwise, throwing them into a cruel and indifferent prison system to get chewed up and spit out. (And that is why I would never work in "behavioral health.")

Mixed in with the violent, shitty, sick people were other, non-violent, non-shitty sick people. For example, there was a beautiful young woman who was so gently and thoroughly psychotic that it was almost charming in a terrifying kind of way. There were also a couple of patients from very prominent families, learned and accomplished and profoundly suicidal.

Yes, they all just get thrown together, men and women, criminal and not, young and old. Two nurses and two mental health techs watch over twelve patients. And if you think they see everything that goes on and that abusive situations aren't occurring, you're kidding yourself.

Don't ever get locked up on a psychiatric ward if you can at all help it.

Along with the drama on the unit, there was drama within the clinical group. We recently had a group project and three of the group members did the minimal work possible and then considered themselves to be done.  The other three of us (two of us, really), did the bulk of the work on the project and carried it across the finish line. It was graded a low B and most of the parts that we got docked points for were from two of the people who did minimal work. We were offered the chance to re-do the project and four of us got together (including one of the people who had only done minimal work to begin with who had a change of heart and showed up to help) and spent an additional seven or so hours working to correct our mistakes. Two of the people did nothing and said nothing but expected their names to be included on the re-write. But we four decided not to include their names and explained to the instructor why we were not including their names and he said it was up to us. So it put a big rift in our group, but...I was over it. I was over carrying people in a group project and I was feeling very retaliatory.

I hate group projects. There's always someone who straight up refuses to do what is required and who is surprised when they suffer the consequences for it.

So today was very uncomfortable, with the two people who had been left off the revised care plan completely shutting the rest of us out. (No big loss.)

So that was Thursday.

Because the clinical day runs so long, I usually leave anywhere from an hour to ninety minutes before Dave does and get back home twenty to thirty minutes before he does. I'm usually pretty wiped out. (It's less physical activity on the psych unit versus on a medical-surgical unit, but it is an emotional drain.) Tonight I was not up to cooking dinner, so we went out and had burgers (d) and a salad with grilled chicken (me) and fries smothered in cheese and green chile. I knew I was going to take a hit, salt-wise, but I didn't care.

Our waitress was named Summer, and because everything spirals back to clinicals, I was reminded of a conversation between a few old-timers on the psych unit who were discussing the types of names never to give your children if you don't want them to end up on a psych unit. Summer was one. It also included any month name, like January, or any weather pattern or natural phenomenon name like Storm or Tempest or Rainbow. Avoid strange spellings of names like Ellysia or Cirene or Tiffeni. And avoid Biblical names like the plague.

See? Knowledge you can use.