Simple Woman's Daybook - My Week 2

A while ago, I created another blog specifically for meme-type entries, Bluegrassgal's Weblog. (I know, original, isn't it? *lol*)

Anyway, my SW Daybook entry for the week can be found at this address: http://bluegrassgal.wordpress.com/simple-womens-daybook-week-2/

My 2nd Prairie Dream of the Day

OK. For the 2nd time today, I have "found" something at the Prairie Dream blog that I just "had to have": The Simple Woman's Daybook, from the Simple Woman blog.

FOR TODAY ...

Outside my Window...a sultry-warm afternoon, and freedom from the noises of the house.

I am thinking...my head hurts, and when do I go back to work? (Today is my day off.)

From the learning rooms...DD (5) giving herself a manicure with the toenail clippers.

I am thankful for...a husband that knows just about anything that needs to be known about computers.

From the kitchen...coffee brewing in our new pot, bought after 3 of us broke the old coffee pot.

I am wearing...brick red w/fake gray lining tee-shirt, blue jeans one size too big (how often does THAT happen? - add that to the thankful bit), and lightish pink crocks

I am reading...blogs on the internet

I am hoping...a day of rest

I am creating...a home business that will hopefully allow me to transition to being a WAHM (i/o a WOHM). Every day I go to work, DD says, "...but I thought you loved me." *OUCH*

I am hearing...my 3 kids' raging case of the galloping grumpy gimmies

Around the house...one very pregnant (w/8 pups) Border Collie.

One of my favorite things...turtle cheesecake

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week...making it through my four shifts of work before the weekend (which I have off).

Here is a picture thought I am sharing with you...




This is my DD about 3 years ago, when we first moved to Kentucky.

Mama Mondays: Begin

In 46 years, you can rack up a LOT of beginnings.

There's the grandmama of them all...being born, of course. Then comes first smile, first step, first word, first day of school all those childhood milestones.

One first I remember is the first time I saw my first child. My blood pressure had skyrocketed during delivery and they gave me an epidural. My bp reading then tanked; the lowest I saw was 70/40, and hubby says it went even lower. After the delivery, I looked like the Michelin man...but I digress. :) Let's just say I was "out of it", and DS had to be taken to the nursery and put on oxygen for a short while.

As I had been induced, I was not allowed out of bed for 24 hours. I was planning my escape - sneaking out of my room, dragging the IV pole along with me. They must've sensed my frustration and put me in a room near the nurses' station. Drat! Too close to the warden's office to make a break for it.

DH brought me a Polaroid picture of our son. I was worried. He looked tiny, bruised (they had used forceps), and had all sorts of wires and tubes hooked up to his little 5 pound 9 ounce frame. And he had a pronounced conehead. I was desperate to hold him in my arms.

The next day, they wheeled his bassinet into my room (as I still had not been released to get out of bed). I was like...this is so COOL! But then, something happened that scared me. The nurse LEFT THE ROOM!!! And left me alone with this tiny little alien that had inhabited my body for a little over 8 months!

I had read the books and articles, and gathered dozens of opinions (some sought, some not) from friends and relatives), but at that precise moment, I could not remember a shred of it to save my live.

Gingerly, I put my feet on the floor and walked over to the bassinet. Little by little, more of my son appeared. He looked a little better than the day before - less bruised, more rosy. Still had that conehead, though. And I wondered .....

"WHAT DO I DO NOW????"

Hillbilly Culture

I'm from Kentucky, so I can poke fun at my in-laws, er, hillbillies. :p



Thar be the revenuers messin' with our free trade.


Thar be the family from the ree-union last summer.


Thar's my new vee-hicle. Ain't she a beaut?

And here's mah brother-in-law. (Not really, but I swear, DH has the same belly!)

How did I end up here?

See The Other Mother Blog for an explanation of the following:

Responsibilities: feeding children, bathing children, clothing children, teaching children, working, taking care of my residents, transporting the residents, feeding the residents, clothing the residents, putting residents to bed, protecting the residents, protecting my family, taking husband to the doctor/hospital when needed, driving on family trips, calling my mother, calling my brother, being available for intimacy ... every once in a while, talking to in-laws, calling friends, paying bills, keeping myself clean, laundry, grocery shopping, budgeting, locking the doors at night, making sure we have insurance, making sure we have gas, paying back money I have borrowed, smiling at people, loaning when asked if I can, going to church, tithing, writing in my blogs, wishing people online a happy birthday, doing meme after meme....:)

This is a good topic for me this week. I'm going back to work tomorrow after 3 days off from the doctor due to stress. My blood pressure was 170/110 on Wednesday. I went to the doctor on Friday, where it was like 130/90 (better), but I was having headache and pressure in my chest. So the doctor gave me some different blood pressure medication (lisinopril) and some headache pills. We got the med same day and on Friday I took my blood pressure at WalMart and it was 113/78. I do not remember the last time it was that low. I don't think it's EVER been that low ... except after the epidural when I was in delivery with Brian (my oldest). My bp then had been 180/160 and after the epidural I saw it at 70/40. DH said it went down to 40/30. But I'm still here, almost 11 years later.

But I digress.

So, what would happen if I just checked out ... took off, and left all the pressures in my life behind. Where's my angel, Clarence? (See "It's a Wonderful Life".) At least I hope it would be like that, and that people wouldn't be better off with someone else or at least without me in their lives. (See, I told you it's been a tough one. Normally, I wouldn't think like that.)

Well, work at least has had a mini-taste of what it would be like without me there this weekend. It must have SUCKED for S & J (two of my co-workers). The employees are organized into "teams" to facilitate the scheduling process. It was "B" team's weekend off. Of the 6 employees on my side in my home, 3 are on B team. That leaves just 3 of us on their days off, which is hard enough. Unless they got some good overtime staff, they are probably cursing up a storm, partially at me and partially at the admins who let 3 people be on one team, two on C team and just me on A team.

Last week the federal inspectors were in: DOJ (Department of Justice). We have been doing a LOT of extra things in order to impress them. After all, they hold the future of the facility in their hands. If they think things are going badly enough, they could shut the place down and ship the residents elsewhere.

Tuesday of the week before last, there was a "scent and feel" party at the on facility salon. While I agree that it is nice for the residents (many of whom I consider more friends and family than "residents"), to get out, we were told that EVERY SINGLE ONE of our ladies were going and the home manager handed me individual envelopes with $25 per resident to spend.

Sounds good, right?

The flip side: Out of 7 ladies, 5 are in wheel chairs. We cannot transport a wheelchair and one of the two remaining ladies who do walk (but are unstable) at the same time...it's not safe. We had four staff. One was at dinner. Two were needed to help feed some of the ladies who have a more difficult time with that. So I took one lady up to the salon. This woman has PICA - where people eat or attempt to eat things that are not meant to be eaten. Mostly she goes for strings and such, but in the shower, when you wash her hair she will repeatedly put her hand up into the suds on her head and then stuff them into her mouth. And most of the items they had at this party were lotions. There were a few body sprays (which would have worked) but they were in sets with other things. We wound up getting her a pair of slip on house shoes and two pair of socks. Turns out she can't wear the house shoes because she fell out of them ... as have several other of the ladies.

So what would happen if I weren't there? I like to think that I am a good employee because I actually care about the residents. Of course, the management wants to keep them alive, because once they're gone...no more money. I'd like to think it's not as cold and hard as that, but the farther away the administration gets from actual regular contact with the "individuals" (which is the current 'preferred' term for the residents), the less they seem to treat the residents like numbers or units to be managed than living breathing people.

Like this whole "you have to take them out tonight" business, which actually happened two days in a row. And all to show the feds how good we were providing for the residents. IMHO it did the residents more harm than good. If staff from the salon had not come down to help us transport, not all of our ladies would have gotten to go. One lady was supposed to be restricted to the home because of her O2 sats, but the home manager got the doctor to write an order allowing her to go to the salon. This woman had just been in the hospital the week before after a series of seizures (one lasting 20:45 and the other 30 minutes).

Because of that and because the bath on the men's side of the house is broken (we have a fancy-schmancy lift tub because our people cannot get in and out of regular tubs), we are bathing 8-9 people a night in the same tub. After each bath, we had to spay the tub and lift with one disinfectant, let is sit 10 minutes, rinse it off, spray it with another disinfectant, let it sit 3 minutes, and rinse it off. That made each bath (plus sanitization) take about 30 minutes. Thirty x 8 baths = 4 hours. The night at the salon, I didn't get my last bath done until 10:45 pm, 15 minutes before the end of the shift. The lady whom I was bathing normally is in bed by 9:30 at the very latest.

The following day they (some administrators) came in at 6:10 pm and said that we were taking ALL of the ladies to the gym for a gospel quartet concert. One who was quite high up sat and spoon fed a resident, who can feed herself, going faster than normal...so that she could go. This was the same woman who has to be on O2 24/7 ... even when she's on the toilet. They built her hopes up about going to the concert. The nurse had to check her out and give an ok before C was actually able to go ... and C's O2 was not high enough, so they told her she could not go. C was crushed. I was angry. The other ladies were still eating dinner and would not even be finished by 6:35, let alone ready to go out in the cold night to a concert.

Two of them had toileting accidents, and needed baths right away, so they did not go (as the night air was too cold). But I approached the home manager and asked to "mention a concern". (Actually I wanted to tell them to pull their heads out of their a$$es and start thinking about the lives, liberty and happiness of the residents, rather than their own jobs ... but I didn't think that would be taken very well.) I explained the deal with the bathing the previous night and my feeling that 10:45 was too late to be bathing people with serious medical and developmental issues. They agreed, but mumbled something about the tub on the men's side not being able to be fixed because a part had to be ordered ... and it could take as long as 3-4 WEEKS!

While I was bathing one of the aforementioned ladies, the home manager came in and told me, that if I had to miss my lunch, to fill out a time slip for it and it would be added into my hours on my check. My feeling was then that if I didn't get a lunch, relatively at the time I was supposed to get it, they would be calling in the Hazmat team to scrape me off the walls, ceiling and floor with a spoon - because I WAS GOING TO EXPLODE!

Well, thanks to a supervisor from another area ... who went above and beyond the call by coming to cover in our home, I was able to go to lunch at the right time. (Side note: I smoked 8 cigarettes in 45 minutes - a dubious "record" for me .... THAT'S how aggravated I was.)

I know I've strayed far from the topic given, but I guess it boils down to this. Did the residents survive before I got there? Yes. Will they survive after I go? Yes. But I hope since I've been there, and for as long as I am there, that their quality of life is a little better than before. (And if I'm REALLY lucky, I'll set a good example for someone who stays longer than I do.)

*****

Oh, and I wrote actually for 28 minutes. Once the lock opened, it didn't want to shut again. ;)

Meme Twisted - Thursday 13 Random Things About Me

This is my usual (well, as usual as I get) day for a Thursday Thirteen list. But I just got tagged by my buddy Rose to follow a meme: 7 Random Things About Me. So I'm gonna write 13 things about me.

1. DS2 and DD are using me as base in a game of tag ... while I am trying to type this. :)

2. I gave myself a Colles' Fracture (not my x-ray) of my left wrist when I left the apartment one day about 10 years ago after arguing with DH. I went to a local park, walked down a grassy hill in flip flops (instead of taking the nice cement steps about 20 feet farther down the road) and slipped at the bottom, catching myself on my hands. I had barely enough presence of mind to ask directions to the nearest hospital, and enough stubbornness to drive myself there ... with my right hand, of course. I must have looked pretty pitiful because they didn't even do the "take a number" routine at the desk. Note to self: call husband BEFORE they give pain meds, should there ever be a next time.

3. The best acting performance I ever gave was as Winnie in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. In the first act, I was buried up to my waist in a marvelously constructed imitation sand hill. (They had originally considered actually using sand and I thought, "What if I have to go to the bathroom during intermission?" The idea was discarded when it was reasoned that as Winnie is up to her neck in sand in the second act, this might make it difficult for me to breathe. There was one other character in the play, and I think he had 40 some odd words to say. The rest was me talking for about 1.5 hours. Oy!

4. My mother was born in Switzerland and my father was born in West Virginia. (Every time I say that I think of the line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberries!" *LOL*)

5. DH and I met online in a role-playing game back in 1992.

6. The only US states I haven't visited are: Alaska, Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut.

7. Geez, if I'd've been thinking, I would have used each state from #6 as a separate thing! :p

8. DH just came home from fixing a satellite box and was standing in back of me rubbing my shoulders helping me with my list of states (I had left out Alaska and Connecticut). My right shoulder is now officially in pain.

9. I had my hair cut recently from backside length to chin length. This is what's known in my life as "getting a wild hair" about something.

10. I like ginger ale with so much ginger in it that it just about burns my throat while swallowing.

11. When I was 18 I wanted to get my hair corn-rowed. My mother called the department store where I had an appointment and told them not to do it. (It cost $100 and she didn't think this was a worthy use for my money.) I went home with my hair corn-rowed (about 94 braids, I think) and she didn't talk to me for days.

12. I met my first husband online as well and married him about 4 hours after we met in person for the first time.





I know, but I was younger and stupider then.

13. I am spiritual, but not particularly religious.

****

Okay, now on to the tagging business. I think I'm supposed to tag 7 people. Here goes in no particular order:

1. Kate at sweet | salty for her indomitable spirit!

2. Mir at Cornered Office, which is the current location of her blog "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda", due to hosting snafus!

3. Charlene at Crazed Parent, especially for her decorated deck of cards series!

4. Mace of MaceinSpace cause she is a totally cool person from "down under"!

5. CC on her journal at Maya's Mom, cause she is totally addicted to memes like me!

6. Joss on her journal at Maya's Mom, because she tells it like it is!

7. Jada at Scrappin' My Three, because that's the kind of memory-keeping mama I wish I was.



BTW, it's Thursday Thirteen's 118th Edition today!