Stewing away here - angry with our oldest who has been staying with us since Friday. I take him back home tomorrow and frankly will be glad to be rid of him. He has been going out of his way to pick fights with me for the past day and a half and I am just plain sick of him.
He has been in the hospital for 8 weeks recovering from a combo of trauma (2 broken arms, 1 broken femur) and infections (2 blood infections - nearly septic on admission). Got the broken bones fighting with someone on the street. His story about this varies and depends mostly on who his audience happens to be at the moment. What we know for sure is that his tox screen was positive for cocaine, marijuana and alcohol when he was delivered to ER and that someone had dumped him out of his wheelchair hard.
I attended a discharge planning case conference for him last Thursday - 15 people there including me. difficult child 1 informed everyone he was leaving AMA and they couldn't stop him. The housing people told him it would put his housing in jeopardy if he did and he told them he didn't care.
I was grinding my teeth because the idiots had gotten him a loaner power wheelchair and let him have it that morning. I told them he would be gone once they got him a with-c and I don't think they believed me until that meeting.
The team had to set up a care-giver, get him a hospital bed and coordinate a nursing visit to set him up with an external catheter system and it just couldn't be done same day or even next day - since that day was a Friday.
Anyway, after a lot of jockeying he finally agreed to come stay with us for the weekend so he didn't lose his housing. It's such a tough call with him to know where to draw the lines - when are you enabling him and should just walk away and when are you doing what is morally right regardless of the question of enablement.
Things would be SOOOOO different if he weren't so severely physically disabled on top of cognitive and psychiatric impairments. I would never have been at that meeting let alone brought him home for the weekend. But he's finally gotten into a really good supportive housing situation with on-site casework, nursing, medical and psychiatric supports and I just couldn't stand to see him screw it up. He'd only been living there 2 weeks when he went into the hospital and they held his apartment for 2 months!
We live about 100 miles from where he lives now so it's a big hassle to bring him back and forth when he's using a manual chair. I did it anyway on Friday - took a taxi, then BART and then Amtrak to get back home after staying the night in a motel with no clothes, etc. because, stupid me, I hadn't expected to stay the night after a 2 pm case conference. I swear from now on I am always taking a change of undies, toothbrush and my medications with me when I go to the City.
The first two days at home went OK. Then yesterday he started in about how he had to pick up his SSI check before I even took him to pick up the loaner power chair and cath supplies. I'm like - I can't promise that we're going to do that first. We have to coordinate things with a lot of people Tuesday and I won't know until Tuesday morning what order we will be doing things or even when we're going to get to the City. He starts yelling about how I make everything complicated and harder than it has to be.
He has continued along that line but escalating the provocative language all day today. It didn't matter what I said or who I said it to today - it ended up being all about him and how I was being mean or angry or making things hard for no reason.
The issue of course is that he has big plans for his SSI check - street drugs, the sooner the better. As soon as that check is in his hands he will be gone and no one will be able to stop him. He figures that doing things in any other order (i.e. he takes care of business first and gets the check last) is giving up his power and letting me (and all the other adults) maneuver him into doing what he doesn't want to do.
So I am feeling down right oppositional myself at this point - sorry for myself I guess that I have to put up with such an ungrateful brat, regretting agreeing to deal with him and protect him from himself - yet again, and angry with all the other people at that case conference who can just walk away and enjoy their holiday weekend without another thought about difficult child 1 and his problems.
I'm having a tough time being civil and low key at this point. I sure hope I have recovered my cool by early morning or tomorrow will be really ugly.
The most frustrating thing about the whole situation, from my point of view, is that I am damned if I do and damned if I don't: if I do what he wants and dump him off at the hospital to manage for himself (i.e. to go get high and drunk as fast as possible, leaving the caregiver, the nursing staff and who knows who else high and dry back at his housing) it will reinforce this ugly behavior because he will believe he has succeeded in getting rid of me instead of seeing it as negative natural consequences for his behavior. If I don't dump him off but stay and insist on his showing up where and when he's supposed to, then I am simultaneously enabling him and (to be honest) sticking around just to annoy him as long and as thoroughly as possible - thus being sucked into his nasty little passive-aggressive game. There are really no choices in-between with him.
WHAT a tangled web. sigh.
Wish me luck and lots of patience folks.
Thanks for listening.
He has been in the hospital for 8 weeks recovering from a combo of trauma (2 broken arms, 1 broken femur) and infections (2 blood infections - nearly septic on admission). Got the broken bones fighting with someone on the street. His story about this varies and depends mostly on who his audience happens to be at the moment. What we know for sure is that his tox screen was positive for cocaine, marijuana and alcohol when he was delivered to ER and that someone had dumped him out of his wheelchair hard.
I attended a discharge planning case conference for him last Thursday - 15 people there including me. difficult child 1 informed everyone he was leaving AMA and they couldn't stop him. The housing people told him it would put his housing in jeopardy if he did and he told them he didn't care.
I was grinding my teeth because the idiots had gotten him a loaner power wheelchair and let him have it that morning. I told them he would be gone once they got him a with-c and I don't think they believed me until that meeting.
The team had to set up a care-giver, get him a hospital bed and coordinate a nursing visit to set him up with an external catheter system and it just couldn't be done same day or even next day - since that day was a Friday.
Anyway, after a lot of jockeying he finally agreed to come stay with us for the weekend so he didn't lose his housing. It's such a tough call with him to know where to draw the lines - when are you enabling him and should just walk away and when are you doing what is morally right regardless of the question of enablement.
Things would be SOOOOO different if he weren't so severely physically disabled on top of cognitive and psychiatric impairments. I would never have been at that meeting let alone brought him home for the weekend. But he's finally gotten into a really good supportive housing situation with on-site casework, nursing, medical and psychiatric supports and I just couldn't stand to see him screw it up. He'd only been living there 2 weeks when he went into the hospital and they held his apartment for 2 months!
We live about 100 miles from where he lives now so it's a big hassle to bring him back and forth when he's using a manual chair. I did it anyway on Friday - took a taxi, then BART and then Amtrak to get back home after staying the night in a motel with no clothes, etc. because, stupid me, I hadn't expected to stay the night after a 2 pm case conference. I swear from now on I am always taking a change of undies, toothbrush and my medications with me when I go to the City.
The first two days at home went OK. Then yesterday he started in about how he had to pick up his SSI check before I even took him to pick up the loaner power chair and cath supplies. I'm like - I can't promise that we're going to do that first. We have to coordinate things with a lot of people Tuesday and I won't know until Tuesday morning what order we will be doing things or even when we're going to get to the City. He starts yelling about how I make everything complicated and harder than it has to be.
He has continued along that line but escalating the provocative language all day today. It didn't matter what I said or who I said it to today - it ended up being all about him and how I was being mean or angry or making things hard for no reason.
The issue of course is that he has big plans for his SSI check - street drugs, the sooner the better. As soon as that check is in his hands he will be gone and no one will be able to stop him. He figures that doing things in any other order (i.e. he takes care of business first and gets the check last) is giving up his power and letting me (and all the other adults) maneuver him into doing what he doesn't want to do.
So I am feeling down right oppositional myself at this point - sorry for myself I guess that I have to put up with such an ungrateful brat, regretting agreeing to deal with him and protect him from himself - yet again, and angry with all the other people at that case conference who can just walk away and enjoy their holiday weekend without another thought about difficult child 1 and his problems.
I'm having a tough time being civil and low key at this point. I sure hope I have recovered my cool by early morning or tomorrow will be really ugly.
The most frustrating thing about the whole situation, from my point of view, is that I am damned if I do and damned if I don't: if I do what he wants and dump him off at the hospital to manage for himself (i.e. to go get high and drunk as fast as possible, leaving the caregiver, the nursing staff and who knows who else high and dry back at his housing) it will reinforce this ugly behavior because he will believe he has succeeded in getting rid of me instead of seeing it as negative natural consequences for his behavior. If I don't dump him off but stay and insist on his showing up where and when he's supposed to, then I am simultaneously enabling him and (to be honest) sticking around just to annoy him as long and as thoroughly as possible - thus being sucked into his nasty little passive-aggressive game. There are really no choices in-between with him.
WHAT a tangled web. sigh.
Wish me luck and lots of patience folks.
Thanks for listening.
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