3,181 Comments Posted by Lynne

Deja vu all over again! =8-o

You ate Goddog's blood on a Ritz cracker?!?!?!?! Did you at least wash your hands first? =8-o

I hate to be an oinking chauvinist female sow here, but how come no one made any comments about the spacious maternity/delivery room with amphitheater and multiple seats for one's staring pleasure in the Cynthia Lee Memorial Hospital and all of the sudden when we are potentially looking at the private parts of the male anatomy there is discomfort that people would be watching while they are in a compromising position? Mebbe it's different when the stirrup is on the other foot, eh? Eh? [nudge nudge wink wink]

Oink oink oink oink.

Honestly, most of the time y'all men are in pretty good shape because no one ever asks to stick a camera up your dress to take a picture of you when you are definitely at your best - giving birth. Videocameras in birthing rooms are the stupidest idea anyone ever came up with.

But let me tell you how I REALLY feel about this. :-)

I know - ~Me is bad, ain't she? ;-)

Stop! Stop! 8`-) You're killin' me! 8`-)

Now a Utica crib - that makes me gag and shiver. :-(

Wawawawawawawawawa!!!!!!!!!!! 8`-) Oh, you are cruisin' for a bruisin' from Motts, you double-bad thing! 8`-)

So, ~Me, I assume you meant the very last definition? ;-)

RANT v. intr.
To speak or write in a angry or violent manner; rave. v. tr.
To utter or express with violence or extravagance. n.

1. Violent or extravagant speech or writing.
2. A speech or piece of writing that incites anger or violence.
3. Chiefly British. Wild or uproarious merriment.

Randar, there is actually a reason for this. People with motor impairments walk more easily on hard, even surfaces. As soon as they start to walk on softer surfaces, such as mats, rugs, grass, dirt, etc., there isn't as much perfectly flat surface for their feet and their systems can't accommodate or make up for the lack of evenness and they are more likely to fall. It is difficult for people who walk well and naturally to understand exactly how much balancing and counterbalancing we do just walking across the room. The unimpaired human body has a system that knows how to adjust constantly and unconsciously to tiny variations in most surfaces and make walking across these surfaces look smooth and effortless. This is not the case for people with motor impairments, where even the slightest change in surface forces the person to either stop and try to adjust to the surface change or to lose balance. I know I am not saying that very elegantly, but that's the basic gist of the thing. So if you have motor impairments and walk on grass, rugs, mats, etc., you are much more likely to fall.

The people with the greatest risk of falling usually wear helmets, knee pads, and elbow pads to prevent serious injury when they fall, so the cement surface isn't as big an issue there, but falling and hitting hard furniture on the way down is always a problem, so softer furniture, both to sit on and to bump against, makes sense.

We have tried setting up mats beside the beds of people who are more likely to fall when they get out of bed at night, but it makes it much more difficult for them to find their balance when they step on one, especially if they have just woken and are groggy. Today's solution is generally a silent bed alarm for people who get up at night (to alert staff to come assist them to walk), good shoes (for daytime), soft or padded furniture, helmets and knee or elbow pads, and gait belts for staff to assist people when they walk. It's better than putting them in a wheelchair prematurely, which would also keep them safe but is a bad idea for multiple reasons. Of course, people ARE safer if they are forced to stay in wheelchairs to avoid being injured, but then . . . :-)

As far as rugs, rugs actually are more difficult to walk on because there is generally a soft pad underneath, so the surface isn't flat. If you use a rug you end up increasing falls so people can have a nicer surface to land on, but that doesn't really make sense when you look at it that way. It is also more difficult for people to move their wheelchairs across floors with rugs, and you don't want to decrease the mobility and independence of people who use wheelchairs.

Area rugs are an idea, but they are an incredibly high source of injuries because people have a hard time adjusting to the change in surface from hard floor to soft rug and back. And finally you have the entire matter of sanitation, as many of the people who live in these settings have issues with incontinence.

Hey, ~Me - does that qualify as a rant? ;-)

Hey Ed! Look! It's a scale!

~No static at all - FM - no static at all~~

:-)

Or a harness for someone who wanted to take a bath and didn't have the trunk support to do it without slipping under the water. It is MUCH easier to shower an uncooperative person than to try to put them in the tub, and I can speak from very wet personal experience about this. :-)

Many clients, especially those with cerebral palsy or other motor impairments, enjoy the bathtub because the warm water helps loosen their overworked muscles and allows them some actual relaxation and a temporary release from the cruel hands of gravity. That's why hydrotherapy was used as much as possible with this particular group of folks. Not cold water, as someone suggested earlier, because that tends to make people less compliant and more irritable than soothing and relaxing warm water.

As an FYI, many places currently use a lot of upright portable privacy screens. I myself prefer curtains and always push for them, but there are ways of putting up privacy screens across the stalls as well. I know that at one point there were problems with clients locking themselves in the stalls if they had solid doors, and folks also sometimes had severe injuries if they lost their balance when getting up from the toilet and hit the door or if they had a seizure and hit the door. As well, if you have a client who engages in fecal smearing or ingestion you need to keep an eye on them - for obvious reasons. And that is just a part of your every day work - they don't pay you extra to clean people who are covered from head to toe with feces - and then brush their teeth as well.

Again, the initial reason for these practices wasn't to degrade and humiliate people, it was the result of minimal funding, overcrowding, and low staffing levels.

As a sidenote, ask your parents and grandparents if they always voted for social welfare spending or if they fought all tax increases. ;-)

JAVA, if you think that most MDs actually took the time to view patients you are mistaken - I wish they would have, but few left their offices. Besides, MDs are one of the few groups that are allowed to look at naked people and can actually ask them to take their clothes off without getting hit. :-) Why would they spend time looking at naked people in institutions, most of whom were fairly handicapped, when they could open up a private practice, do physicals, and look at all the nude nonhandicapped people they wanted?

In former days the emphasis was on economics - the budget was miniscule and that meant staffing was very low. In order to take care of the most people in the quickest, easiest, safest fashion (with the least amount of money provided by the latest taxpayers' vote) you had to come up with designs that understood the lack of staffpower and the general condition of the people living there. Privacy is a luxury when the staffing ratio is 1 staff to 30 clients. In order for people to even get baths you have to develop a fast and safe method of doing it. No one enjoyed it, no one believed things would get so crowded, and it wasn't built for someone's sadistic pleasure, although there were and are some sick people (as in every group) who may have enjoyed staring at nude people.

Think about being the sole caretaker for 30 people, most of whom can't walk, who don't understand what you are saying to them, and who can't or won't cooperate when you are trying to clean them up. You have just finished dinner and you are supposed to get all 30 people bathed and ready for bed and it is just you. One of the people in your group wants to take a bath, but you aren't sure she can hold herself up. You could do like they did in some places and have everyone walk through showers and just hose them down. Baths were a luxury because you had to clean the tubs out in between clients, and that took time, so seeing bathtubs is a good thing. However, what if you are working with Client #1 and Client # 2 has a seizure behind you and slips under the water and drowns? What if someone wants to go in the tub room to drown themself? Privacy is the first "luxury" to go when there are few staff and lots of people.

I know that every time someone commits suicide in a mental hospital or jail everyone yells about how they should have been monitored. But then there is a group that hollers about their lack of privacy if they are constantly monitored.

Things are MUCH better today, but there are still many places where we are still working on the concepts of privacy and dignity. And remember - this is a pretty Western/Americanized concept of privacy - there are many other places in the world that consider this a strange thing - to prefer privacy over group activities. We are a fairly modest culture, Brittany Spears notwithstanding. ;-) However, both in the community and in institutional settings that is the current policy - as we do live in America we want to reflect these cultural values - we work with staff so they understand that we can have both. Now that funding is better and we have better staffing ratios (in the daytime 1 staff to 4 or 5 clients in most places - if you are lucky - and 1 staff to 8 clients at night) we are better able to incorporate both privacy and safety.

But thank God for people like your mother who took care of these folks. Always underappreciated, frequently underpaid, often slandered by outsiders, often pushed around by the more dominant and less caring staff, but working for their charges selflessly because it wasn't about the money - it was about the people they took care of. She earned the love and respect of her charges and could look at herself in the mirror at the end of the day. She is someone we can all definitely look up to. :-)

Isn't the containing cage for the blades back and to the left? I don't believe that a manufacturer, even in the old days, would get away with selling a bladed fan like that without a protective cage.

Motts ---> regarding the word "client":

People who lived in institutions were initially called "inmates" to reflect that they were involuntarily incarcerated. When The Powers That Be decided that a disability was not quite an intentional act, the model moved to a medical one, and "inmates" became "patients" who lived on "wards." With the changing emphasis on "rehabilitation" and the (partial) dropping of the medical model, the label switched to "residents," reflecting that they weren't "patients" but instead people who resided (lived) in these facilities. Times changed and the decision was made to quit calling people by a label that just referred to where they lived. The model changed to habilitation and active (as opposed to custodial) treatment and the term chosen was "clients."

In my mind the positive thing about this particular label is that it infers something very radical and invaluable and is a total change from previous models, and that is that by definition a "client" is someone who decides who gives them services and can therefore choose who provides that service. The provider is a paid person whose job it is to provide a service for that client. For the first time a label reflects that one person is paying another person and that they have some say in their treatment - there is some reciprocity for the first time. I personally believe that this was a huge step forward in the field and it only occurred about 20 or so years ago as an extension of the human rights and People First movements.

Today the label has changed to "consumer" or "individual." Like everyone else, I would love to drop labels entirely. The problem is, if a person doesn't have a label that describes specific program eligibility criteria, s/he doesn't qualify for services. I know that all of us in the field would be thrilled to find a word to use to discuss the people we work with, but it becomes very confusing to call everyone the same thing - staff and people receiving services - and it becomes one large mouthful to say what I keep writing - "people with disabilities." If you just call them "people" then you have to say, "You people who are paid to work here need to get the group of people who pay to live here and come to dinner." And if you try to call everyone by name this doesn't work, because many of these folks can't understand you if you call multiple names at one time - that's just too much information to process.

You know, this stuff is really much harder and more complicated than it looks. I do wish everyone who comes to your site would volunteer to work for a week in a group home, a special ed class, a mental health clinic, or an ER room and then see what terminology they would then use. Maybe they could help us with some good ideas. We always need new blood. This isn't a field that people exactly flock to, after all. :-)