As anyone who hangs on every word I write in this blog will remember, around Christmastime I had a horrible cold that I caught while I was in the waiting room at the ER for the Mustard Gas Scare Incident. In my life, when I catch a cold there is usually a period when it seems like it’s gotten better, when in fact a horrible cough is incubating. That is exactly what happened in this case. Stress makes it worse, and I definitely have some of that.
On Monday, January 2, New Year’s Day Observed, the paranoid schizophrenic downstairs (“J”) assaulted a staff member and threatened another staff member with a knife. Staff is not allowed to use restraints, so they called 911 and we all hoped that he wouldn’t be back later that night. He wasn’t, but it was a stressful night nonetheless. It would have been stressful anyway because it was the night before my new job started, and it seemed unfair that I had to put up with being afraid of violence on top of that.
Tuesday (Jan 3) was my first day at my new job. It mostly went well, although there was one co-worker who was behaving unsafely and risking physical and/or emotional harm to a child, so I had to report her to the director. I had never done anything like that and I wasn’t happy about having to do it on my first day, but the director was awesome and took my seriously and thanked me for letting her know. I felt like I understood the director enough at this point to figure that she was usually understanding, unless you called out sick, which she hated with a passion. So it was unfortunate that when I got home that night I was unable to urinate. I tried to just ignore it and figure that it couldn’t last forever, but then it started to get really painful and I had to convince staff to give me a ride to the ER. When I got there, it felt like I had stepped into a third world country. People were in the waiting room with all kinds of horrific life-threatening conditions and nobody could help them because there were no beds. The best they could do was send a tech around with a vitals machine to occasionally check on the sickest patients to make sure they weren’t actively dying. I got there at 8pm and by midnight, there were more people ahead of me in line than there had been when I had first gotten there and it was obvious that even if I stayed awake all night, it would not be chronologically possible for me to get to work on time if I stayed. I managed to sorta kinda solve the problem well enough in the ER waiting room’s bathroom to keep my bladder from rupturing, which brought my pain down from 8/10 to nuisance-level, and went home.
On Wednesday (Jan 4) I was feeling good about myself for not calling in sick. I resisted the urge to tell people that I had spent most of the night in the emergency room waiting room and the day was okay. After work, I went to urgent care where they diagnosed me with “one hell of a UTI.” Apparently their measuring scale for leukocytes only goes up to 500, so my infection was literally off the charts. They gave me antibiotics and told me to drink a lot of water and I felt optimistic.
Things seemed to be settling down until Friday (Jan 6) when I was back in the evil woman’s room and she was still evil, so I had to write one of my incredibly-strongly-worded emails to the director. They talked to some other people and the woman was placed on LOA. On the one hand I felt good that I had potentially helped kids but on the other hand it was terrifying to imagine that I had had the power to do this to someone. After work I met with one of the regional higher-ups in the group home world due to another strongly-worked email, in which I had expressed that I didn’t feel safe living where I was. She was empathetic but basically acknowledged that staff can’t do restraints and there is absolutely no way to evict someone or enact any consequences whatsoever for their behavior, so basically I was right that I wasn’t safe. She advised that I stay in my room with the door locked. The problem is that there’s no plumbing in my room, so I always have to leave to go to the bathroom, wash dishes, get water to drink, etc. Unfortunately, no amount of validation can make an unsafe situation safer, so that meeting wasn’t very reassuring.
Over the weekend my cough got worse and my housemates stayed their normal selves. On Sunday I was briefly in the dining room when “K” confronted me. “You cursed my piss!” she insisted. I would have thought she was joking if she hadn’t completely lost her mind on another resident the night before about another perceived curse. She kept telling me that I had cursed her urine and had this whole conspiracy theory about how I had done it when I first moved in and I had stolen her urine and spread it all around the house cursing it. She started to say that if I didn’t uncurse it, she was going to grab me by the hair and cause me physical harm, but before she elaborated and further I cut her off and asked how to uncurse her. Then I waved my hands and said the magical incantation she described to “uncurse” her “piss” and she seemed satisfied. So the house didn’t exactly seem safe, especially with “P,” whose baseline is to spend several hours a day in his room aggressively screaming the most vile profanities in the English language. Occasionally he seems like he’s about to attack somebody, but he stops himself and I allowed myself to believe that if he actually attacked someone, he would be kicked out. (Sadly, this was later disproven.)
Monday (Jan 9) I went to work. I was literally wearing a diaper because I was coughing so hard my bladder couldn’t handle it, I had spent a ton of money the night before on Mucinex, and my IQ was about 30 points below its norm, but in spite of the fact that my cough had obviously turned into bronchitis, the director said I had done the right thing by not calling in sick. “I don’t tolerate that,” she said. The whole day was awful. I couldn’t find kids’ backpacks or diapers or anything and I just felt like I was operating in a Fog of Stupid all day and I was sure I was going to get in trouble for it. I didn’t want to be the next person put on LOA now that I had opened that can of worms. I was just not functioning, which made my anxiety go up, which made my brain function even less, and it felt like a familiar vicious cycle. That evening I went back to urgent care, where despite their being absolutely slammed, they were alarmed by my cough. The doctor gave me a formal diagnosis of bronchitis and to add icing to the cake, they took a urine sample and apparently my UTI had not responded at all to the last antibiotic and was still off the charts. They gave me a note for work saying that I would have to be out for the rest of the week. Unfortunately, on top of everything else their waiting room flooded and nobody had time to fill out the stupid form that the group home requires in order for me to take medication, so I had to smuggle my antibiotics home in my purse.
I thought that had been a bad-enough day, but when I got home, f***ing “J” was there. Apparently despite the fact that he was known to be dangerous and he never takes his meds, his civil rights are more important than my right to safety. I don’t think it’s J’s fault that he’s psychotic. I’m not angry with him. I am very angry at the system because if his psychosis is causing him to physically attack people, he needs to be in a facility where staff can use restraints. I’m literally here for a trauma disorder. Being forced to share a home with violent criminal offenders is not therapeutic. The silver lining here I guess is that I can now appreciate the lengths Dr. X went to to keep me out of the state hospital, but I still need to get out.
So yesterday (Tue, Jan 10) I spent all day trying to figure out how to get out of the group home asap. Unfortunately, it seems that I just don’t have the money to live someplace safe. I’m worried that when I get back to my job it will be a familiar process in which:
1) I overachieve (I’m always 15 minutes early, I agree to do all undesirable tasks, etc)
2) Something happens to make me slip up (like bronchitis)
3) I’m so terrified that I’m in trouble that I get dissociated and can’t function because I’m in constant terror of doing a bad job or “getting in trouble”
4) I DO get in trouble because I can’t function
5) I end up in the hospital
6) Either I quit because I’m humiliated or they just go ahead and pull the plug for me
I feel like I remember describing this same process when I was inpatient but I don’t have the spoons to look it up right now. My vocational rehab coach has been trying to encourage me that step #3 doesn’t have to happen. My friends think maybe jumping straight into working full-time was too much of an adjustment, especially since I’ve been uncharacteristically snapping at them and such. I did the math with my current wages, and I could work 15 hours a week rather than 40 and stay on social security and food stamps and financially come out ahead of where I would be working full-time. But the main reason I want to be working isn’t the money, it’s that someday I want to have kids and how can I do that if I’m “disabled”? If I did move, I don’t know whether to move closer to work or if that would jinx me. But it doesn’t matter because I’ve contacted a ton of potential roommates and I just can’t find a place that I can afford. I would need a loan for like $3,500. And, as my friends pointed out, when I’m extremely sick and also extremely emotional is probably not the best time to be making major decisions like this.
In good news, the stars aligned and I got a last-minute appointment with my therapist for Friday. I’m going to my actual PCP tomorrow so that will be a nice break from random urgent care people who are amazing but don’t know me and don’t have access to my medical records.
I’m exhausted. I can’t remember what I needed to do next because I can’t hold a thought for more than a second right now. Maybe this isn’t the best time to be making a to-do list, anyway.
