Hi everyone on this first day of November. I’m not struggling as badly with memories of my admission to the psych ward (November 2, 2007) as I was in previous years. However, I’m struggling nonetheless.
Today, I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. It’s been a while. I just had my last cup of coffee for the day and will probably take a break from writing this post for my 8PM soft drink and meds. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.
If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. It’s been a mixed bag but mostly rainy with daytime highs around 13°C. I didn’t do a lot of walking, but still managed to meet my movement goal each day this week. Unfortunately, it seems that my Apple Watch doesn’t care that I paused my activity rings while sick with probable COVID during the second half of September, as my streak is now down to 33 days.
If we were having coffee, then I’d moan about the fact that the care home is chronically short-staffed. There is, fortunately, a new staff here who started orienting a few weeks ago. She started her orientation on my side of the home on Tuesday. That day, I tried to make smalltalk with her, knowing that she’d be oriented to my activity the next day, but she hardly said a word. The next day, indeed, she was oriented to my activity. This went okay’ish, in the sense that I accepted her for the whole two-hour time slot and together with the staff doing the orienting, explained several activities. However, once again my attempt at getting acquainted with her didn’t get a response. The staff complimented me on how well I’d done. I told her she’d probably use that against me. I was right.
In the evening, the staff said she’d be orienting the new one to my morning routine the next day. Having hardly spoken with the new staff, I wasn’t comfortable with being naked around her yet, but the staff didn’t accept this. She claimed I hadn’t accepted the new staff in the afternoon either and just don’t want to meet new people and screamed that soon there’d be no-one left. I tried to explain my point of view, with the help of another staff, but to no avail.
On Thursday indeed the staff tried to force me to accept the new one for her orientation. She yelled that I had one chance and if I refused the new one now, she’d be considered as having had her orientation to me. This, I consider horribly unfair, as with the other clients, new staff get multiple orientations. But it’s in my rules, the same rules about no completely unfamiliar staff. I was originally told that the reason for the rules is simply money, ie. the fact that regular temp workers are not given an orientation period so I’m lucky to get one chance with them. I understand this, but I don’t think it should apply to staff who do get an orientation period. And for what it’s worth, I never said I needed temp workers to be oriented to me, but staff need to know these workers are still strangers to me and aren’t as familiar as the staff who’ve been working here for years. No rules can explain this, it’s about empathy. And I’m pretty sure the staff telling me off about refusing the new one, doesn’t have much of that for us clients.
If we were having coffee, I’d also moan about the fact that I now have no assigned staff at all. Like I said a while ago, the student one left for the intensive support home a month ago. The next one doesn’t want to work with me for now due to me having hurt her feelings. And yesterday I found out that the third one is off sick. I E-mailed the support coordinator asking her that, if I need to have another assigned staff, it won’t be the staff who I mentioned above. Don’t get me wrong, she’s fun-loving and great with activities, but she doesn’t know me behind the rules.
If we were having coffee, I’d try to end on a positive note. Yesterday, like six weeks ago, I joined the dance party at the institution townhouse. This time, I decided that I could deal with there not being a staff member for me and to just ask a volunteer if I needed help. One of the reasons was the fact that there were only two staff who are authorized to give meds at the home during the dance and I didn’t feel like I could ask one of them to accompany me, yet the other staff haven’t been oriented to me yet. I considered asking that one of the temp workers accompany me, but, for reasons that you’ll understand if you’ve read this far, felt this would be used against me. The dance was fun.
Finally, one more slightly positive note: we had general elections here in the Netherlands on Wednesday and, thankfully, Democrats 66 (D66) won. This isn’t the party I voted for, but it’s much better than the far-right Party for Freedom, which came out second. D66 is the most progressive, queer-supportive party out there. The reason I didn’t vote for them is the fact that healthcare and social security matter even more to me and the fact that D66 would likely need an economically right-wing party on the government too. However, unless Rob Jetten (D66’s leader) is a total hypocrite and cooperating with the far-right JA21 in favor of the left-wing GroenLinks-PvdA, things will be okay’ish in this respect. In any case, I’m looking forward to the first openly gay prime minister.
A Multitude of Musings 