Hellooooo, Monday.

[rivka]

The third of the month is Check Day. That's when disability checks and Temporary Emergency Assistance checks arrive, and people who have been broke for a week or more suddenly have money in their pockets again. Some of them spend the third getting money orders or paying their bills in person, because they don't have checking accounts and don't have any other way to take care of their business. Some of them spend the third getting high. Few of them spend the third keeping their clinic appointments. Check Day means phenomenally high no-show rates.

So I spent the morning sitting around, waiting for clinic patients who might also want to be research participants, and only managing to recruit one solitary person. Yawning. Reading two-year-old copies of People.

Back at the institute, suddenly a breathless research nurse was knocking at my door. She had a former study participant on the phone - desperate, sobbing, talking wildly. What should she do? Could I help? And so I found myself unexpectedly on the phone with a suicidal stranger, doing my best to calm her and assess for dangerousness and convince her to be hospitalized and marshall resources to keep her safe in the meantime. And then coordinating her transportation to the hospital, and calling ahead to the psychiatric ER, and getting the background information they'd need from the research nurse.

The strange thing, in retrospect, is how ordinary it seemed. I wasn't scared. I didn't have that oh-god-what-do-I-do feeling I used to have in psychiatric emergencies. It was just a matter of "okay, here's what needs to be done" - and I did it. She's at the hospital right now, getting the care she needs.

And now, in the late afternoon, a semi- research emergency: a grant due next week of which we have suddenly become a part, and a stack of 80 18-page documents from which I need to extract data to support the grant application. I wish I had some of those slack morning hours back...

Whew. And then I'll be on to physical therapy, and then making dinner at high speed so we can leave on time for English Country Dance. And then two hours of dancing to finish off the night. Helloooooo, Monday.

Comments

Speechless

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Wow. I am awestruck.

-J

Re: Speechless

[rivka.livejournal.com]

See, that's the thing, though. My realization today was "it's just work." It's not particularly complicated. I think I used to make it more complicated for myself than it was - for example, in grad school I remember awkwardly trying to come up with a tactful way to ask if someone was suicidal. I think I was afraid of putting ideas in their heads, or offending them, or something. It seemed like an enormously complicated thing to find out. But in reality, you just ask: "It sounds like things have been incredibly hard. Have you thought about suicide? Have you done anything to hurt yourself?" It's not complicated at all.

There's something about an emergency evaluation like this that's very stark and very simple. You don't have to worry about taking a detailed history, or making a sophisticated differential diagnosis between subtly different disorders, or identifying underlying dynamics. Someone's life is in danger. You figure out how much danger, and you arrange for safety and treatment to happen to that person. It's just work.

I'm not explaining this very well. Does it make sense at all?

Re: Speechless

[redbird]

Yes, it makes sense. And you're explaining it quite well.

Re: Speechless

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

"It's just work" for a surgeon to save a life. "It's just work" for a police detective to solve a crime. "It's just work" for a writer to make a reader cry. That doesn't make it less impressive.

-J

Re: Speechless

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

It does make sense, really, and I wonder if it's just experience that helps. You've had to ask many times, so it's not a big deal, and you've seen few bad reactions from asking (I assume this is true, at least), and are more confident that you won't get a bad reaction.