I believe I left off on my very first day at this new job. Well I'm not going to go into specific detail of every little thing that happened that day, or any of the following days. What I'm going to do now is describe some of the clients that I worked with.
First, the woman that opened the door for me at the apartment on that first day. She was short, with short brown hair and a cute, little girl type of smile. She was kind of shy and would giggle lightly when a joke was made. She had her own cell phone that she prepaid on, with money that she got from the state, and you would always see her texting. Who she was always texting, I have no idea. I never asked. She was also a smoker. She would smoke more than anyone I have ever met. She got a cigarette an hour. If she smoked more than that, she would run out of cigarettes and then she would be mad. One thing that really surprised me about this woman(she was in her thirties) was that she had a young son. I can't remember if she had been married or if it had just been a boyfriend, but whichever it had been, he had her son with him and she rarely got to see him. She had a dream of one day getting her son full time.
The other young girl who was at the apartment when I got there the first day was bedridden. She had cerebral palsy. Originally she was in a wheel chair. But only a few weeks before I started working, she got a new chair and got a cist on her butt, so she was bedridden until it was healed. She had a nurse come in every week to clean the cist and rebandage it. There was a tube coming out of it to drain the fluids to help it heal. Because of this cist, and because she was always in her bed, unmoving, we had to shift her position every hour or so. If there were two staff working, we could carry her into the living room and set her on two bean bag chairs so she could watch TV. This girl(who was also in her thirties but looked like she was in her teens because she was so skinny) was one of the happiest people I've ever met. She loved music and loved talking. During my four hour shift, I could spend almost all of it in her room talking to her, if it had been allowed. She did haven a hoyer that we were supposed to use, but when there were two staff working, it was faster to carry her. That was probably a violation of the rules, but we never cared.
The third roomate really was a young girl. She was only eighteen and a senior at the local high school, in the special ed program. She got on the bus every morning at six and came home on the bus every day at three. So when I worked mornings at the apartment, I never saw her. But if I worked weekends, she would be there. She was tall, but had problems with her right(or it could have been her left, I don't remember exactly) hip and had had many surgeries. She walked with somewhat of a limp. She also had down syndrome and you could see it in her face. But she had one of the prettiest smiles and she would laugh over the silliest things. She was exceptionally smart and was excited about graduating. Whenever I worked with her, she would insist we watch the Disney Channel. If she played in her room, she wanted me to come with her and she would show me her music and her toys.
These three roomates almost always got along. The first woman, whom I'll call Elise, would get mad at the third girl, whom I'll call Samantha, for the smallest things. I honestly cannot even remember what she would get mad about. But they both loved the second girl, whom I'll call Cassie. The few times I worked evenings there, I would let them eat dinner in Cassie's room so that she didn't have to eat alone like usual. I once worked an evening when two girls from another house came over for dinner and everyone gathered around the table, and we brought Cassie out so that she could eat with everyone. These were times when she couldn't stop smiling.
To be continued . . .
