Friday, August 16, 2013

The Chaos of Nursing

Can I just tell you how challenging it is to have nurses here?

Have I mentioned how hard it is to keep anything and everything "weird" picked up and out of sight?

We fail at that regularly - I know, because one of our new nurses is Pagan, and we know because she decided to ask based on a few things left out here and there.

I mean...it's really really really nice to have a Pagan nurse.

Really nice. A relief.

For the first time ever, we went to Pagan Pride Day as a family (and boy did we need the extra set of hands!) - something we've never attempted before, because we were afraid to ask any of our obviously Christian nurses to go. We don't have to watch every word out of our mouths. And she's a really good nurse. Maybe not as experienced as some (she's younger than I am), but smart, on her toes, picks up after herself (a big pet peeve here of late), pays attention to Leaf's subtle signals, and has managed to gain Leaf's trust in only 5 shifts - that's a big deal.

And it's a nice thing for her too. If you can imagine working for families all the time who honestly believe that anyone who believes what you do is evil, you can guess how some of these have gone for her, even without her coming out of the broom closet.

Of course, we also know that the agency (and many current and former nurses) think we're odd. I think we're odd, at least compared to most people I know, so it's not a shock, but if that's what they think based on our carefully cleaned up home.....goodness knows what they'd think if we didn't.

Our favorite nurse is out on medical leave. We've oriented 3 new nurses in the last 6 weeks and we still have open shifts. More new nurses to come....more opportunities to scare people away.

Sigh.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Milestones

Normally around here we talk about inchstones, but in this case, I think it's really time to use the word milestone.

Earlier this week, sitting in the waiting room for the speech therapist, Acorn got out his communication device, and from the main screen, he hit the following buttons:

Quick Talk (a page with lots of sentence starters)
I want
to eat
snacks
chips

"I want to eat chips"

A whole sentence. By himself.

When I told him we didn't have any, he said it again - several times.

Eventually, we went back to our speech therapy session and he said the same thing to the therapist. She found him some cheese puffs, and then asked for more, saying both "more" and "I want that" with his device, and with sign language, multiple times.

Hooray for breakthroughs!