Volume 1, Issue 4

Riverside – Hundreds of dollars get spent on wages for county employees at every Quality Improvement Committee (QIC) meeting, yet, we do not understand what gets accomplished that improves the lives/tasks for consumers, family members, providers and staffers.
 

Unit “A” — As I lay in my bed that morning with my eyes shut, I could still feel the imprint of the slick gloss walls penetrating my eyelids. The more I squeezed the visual muscles the more acute I became to the daylight hour. It wasn’t working.

Then, through free association, I began to tabulate the frequent procedure of getting up through the night to shut my unit door to block out the ward’s disruptive noise. It was annoying the hell out of me that staff continued to open my door throughout the night without shutting it. The whole process cost me a lot of sleep.

I got up, showered, and ended up sitting back on my bed. I thought, “Now what? Boring, boring…boring.” I showed some initiative and straightened up my room. Then I grabbed a psych book and went into the dayroom to read for a while. My mind began to drift. It soon became apparent that my mind wasn’t able to tolerate the constant flow of psychology. I was yearning for a different script. As I

was considering exactly what it was that I wanted, my focus altered to encompass the rhetoric I overheard from staff. It was level-one stuff. Pure boring and aimless conversation. It was so flat that I had a hard time staying interested enough to follow along. Staff dialog shifted from gossip to the flavor of their food. Someone shoot me, please! At least the psychotic patients were creative enough to use word-salad that offered a challenge to decipher the coded syntax. But that level-1 stuff, please! It would be nice if they could intermittently graduate to level-two. Personally, I mostly opted for the framework of level-three conversation, which consisted mostly of problem solving, ideas, and concept development. All pure and delightful level-three stuff. Perhaps, one day I might go into business and hang out a shingle for counseling services along with a nifty motto, “We are compassionate and sensitive to level-one thinkers.”

I reached for the receiver and tapped off numbers on the digital keypad. The information was routed to a terminal and a voice picked up at the destination.

“Hello?”

Kathi: “Cristina, can you come by and visit me today?” I asked her if she could bring a couple of magazines. Specifically,
 

“American Scientific” and “Discover.” The connection was terminated. I had something to look forward to.

When Cristina arrived I was pretty excited. Now, I know how a poodle feels when its owner comes by the pound to give it a Scooby snack. I was ready to perform and do back flips. There was a problem, however. The pound owner was examining my Scooby snack very closely. She insisted on withholding my anticipated level-3 magazines because they had staples in them. Ahhgggggg…..these level-1 thinkers send me into orbit. Irritation electrified throughout my body. I went into a sub-routine of intellectual combat and she was out of ammo and completely disarmed. I snatched a few magazines out of the ward rack that were full of staples and smacked them down in front of her.

Progress Note: Patient yelled at staff and called staff a “B****.” Patient threw magazines at staff. Almost hit staff with magazines. Patient states, “You’re just picking on me! You don’t like me.

Her argument was so completely pathetic. She must sort buttons as a part time job due to her incapacity to put 2 and 2 together. Cristina just stood there and rolled her eyes. She finally handed me my magazines.

[Cont... Pg 9]