on control

i was thinking about when i volunteered in the nursing home last year as a physical/ occupational therapist assistant. one of my duties was to go to a patient's room and help them get ready for their therapy appointment. once they were dressed and their hair was combed i would wheel or walk them downstairs to the therapy room. in many cases i was the grim reaper for people who were in severe pain, depressed, or just exhausted from their medications, surgeries, or family visits. and here i was, little blond jenny, who must have been so annoyingly cheerful telling them their appointment with pain, suffering, and exercise was dawning upon them. i learned very quickly that i did not want to be a messanger from patient to physical therapist telling the therapist "mrs jones is tired today and wont come downstairs with me". that was not acceptable so i became a little more fiesty with patients. luckily no one but myself saw me as being mean. "you just wont take no for an answer," one patient said and then gently smiled at me, letting me know i wasnt as evil as i felt. but what else could i have done? surely i will run into this problem again and again in my career. i hate being the grim reaper and am empathetic to people's reluctance for therapy. but i also know and advocate the need for therapy. it was then that i connected a lesson learned from katy, my teacher/ supervisor, just last week.

laura is seven and terrified of storms and vacuums. i learned very quickly that primal fear can add one hundred pounds to a sixty pound body. laura drops to the floor if something terrifies her. there is no physical way to move her from that spot. i learned to calm her down and wait her out. one afternoon it began to storm. sheets of rain fell from the sky & there was a gentle thunder. lucky for us, it was also dismissal time. i prepared laura to go home and our last quest was walking to the bus. i held laura by the hand and tried to sing a rhyming song about squirells. anything to get her mind off the storm. we approached the doors of the school and laura dropped. she was not going out into the storm no matter what i did or sang. katy anticipated this event and squatted down next to laura. she told laura she had a choice: she could exit the school through these doors or the front doors. laura stopped crying and answered that she would prefer exiting through the front doors. she stood up and we exited the school, walked through the rain, and i successfully buckled laura into her bus seat. "i gave laura a choice," katy told me later. "she cant control the weather but she needed some kind of control over the situation. so she controlled what door she exited through and luckily that was all the control she needed."

next fall i am leaving for the twin cities. my quest: to become an occupational therapist. i know that i will spend a modest to great portion of my career motivating people who, understandably, resist therapy. they may not gain 100 pounds of primal fear in the process like laura but im sure the fight will be of similar caliber. is the key to motivation related to the ammount of control you give a person? will a nursing home resident feel a significant amount "better" if they are allowed to choose the color of their room? i am learning that working with people takes loads creativity and a positive outlook. it can be exhausting! i have learned so much from katy and laura this year about human behavior, motivation, disability, and needs. i am clinging tight to this information & hope it stays locked in the front of my brain.