Black and white Finland
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Helsinki Sunday
I was given/awarded? earned? a ‘one off payment’ after filling in a carers assessment form. Wow. A brief letter asked for my bank details to transfer the money. Wow. I picked myself off the floor and decided to tag an extra day on to my Finnish work trip. A day and night in Helsinki. A carers break.
It was fab, fun and sunny.
Today I got a letter from the County Council asking for confirmation that the money has been spent in line with the scheme. Eh? The scheme? With receipts.
Oh.
Naantali sunset
The Unit. Day 71
Day 71. And LB is happy again. He’s definitely turned a corner, as staff told me yesterday, and is delighting them with his humour. He is one hilarious dude. Time to start thinking about next steps. But for now I’m off to a disability conference in Finland (and some cheeky Finnish street photography) which couldn’t be better timing. 🙂
Order among chaos
Image
The Unit. Day 68
“And LB, make sure you say ‘Hello’ before you ask grandma for your bus magazine. Ok?”
“Yes.”
…
“Hello LB.”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“Hello.”
“Did you enjoy the bus museum?”
“Hello.”
“Would you like a drink?”
Where’s my bus magazine?”
Choice and enthusiasm
Beginning to find our way around this choice issue with LB at last. Or just picking up the techniques we used for years before ‘choices’ were relayed through and monitored by a third person. Yesterday I rang the unit and asked if LB wanted to go out somewhere today. Yes. Good.
This morning, after much thought and discussion with Rich about where to take him (we don’t want to go too far down the route of endless treats and no sniff of dishwasher-land), we agreed the bus museum would be a good plan. A ‘bus museum plus’ plan. A pleasure and pain model.
I picked him up from the unit at 12.
“Where do you want to go then LB?”
“Bus museum.”
“Ok. We’ll go to the bus museum. And then we’ll go to Sainsbury’s after to do the shopping.”
“Sainsbury’s after?”
“Yep. Bus museum followed by Sainsbury’s shopping.” End of.
Nearly four hours of watching mechanics and enthusiasts in action, with a vintage bus ride thrown in. And then a packed Sainsbury’s at closing time. All done joyously.
Don’t you just love buses?
The Unit. Day 67
Bit of a gap in posts for various reasons, none of which relate to LB. For once. Anyway, LB’s life is currently reflecting Candy Crush. Groundhog day at level 125. [Yes you Candy Crushers, suck it up.. it’s a therapeutic tool for me at the mo’ and getting to 125 has taken many, many night time/early morning hours. And I’m STUCK]. The choice offering is interfering in LB’s (non) school attendance. Decisions made in the weekly community team meeting about going to the farm to work are sunk by him being given the option to say ‘no’. So he’s been unit-bound since the buffet lunch last Sunday.
Not a big surprise really. Give any teenager the choice of school/work or doss off, most would choose the latter. But most teenagers aren’t offered that choice. And most would eventually realise that they have to do something productive. The adult space opening to LB is looking alarmingly like a version of day-centre-life.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned an article about an Oxford based learning disabled man’s (Rob?) long term experience of a day centre that was in a Sunday mag years ago. Rob? said if they finished their task of sorting screws (or whatever it was) before the end of the session (probably around 3pm), the staff tipped the trays out so they could start again. The futility of this activity was piercing. The article could have been (I wasn’t as up to speed in those days) heralding the increase in self-advocacy groups and advent of direct payments as I think Rob? went on to be an early member of My Life My Choice. These developments were great but we all know (well those of us who look at reality rather than the rhetoric *cough cough*) that this shift has been largely superficial. There are the lucky few who have fallen into an exceptional (but still cash strapped) social enterprise or individual setting. Most are unemployed, unfulfilling any potential they have. Eh, what’s that? Remploy? How many ex-Remploy employees have found new jobs? Naw, let’s not go there…*
I think introducing choice has erased discipline for young dudes like LB. The number of injunctions he took out against the dishwasher, as his allocated family task, was hilarious, but the job got done. School similarly have been easing sixth-formers into working environments, trying to help them understand that work is a part of life. But once you take that discipline away, you’re left with yawning space to fill. With DVDs, trips to the shops or fast food restaurants and hanging around.
That’s it for now, really. Unless anyone has any hints about cracking level 125 ?
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/23/remploy-workers-new-jobs-labour
The Unit. Day 63
You know that saying; that things can’t get worse? Well that’s turning out to be a load of old codswallop. After the whole CPA meeting surprise (see yesterday’s cheeky little number for details) and, as yet, no sniff of what the future might hold for LB (Don’t. Just don’t even mention support), I went to visit him yesterday evening. He was in bed, dozing. With a bitten swollen tongue. Signs of a seizure. Or size of an elephant it might well have been.
The bitten tongue had been noted and Bonjela on order. The seizure dimension overlooked. LB’s seizures have always worried the pants off me. Not least because it took about four ‘in your face’ tonic clonic epics before the docs would even entertain the idea that he might have epilepsy. We were tripping over that old ‘he’s got to learn to manage his stress/star charts anyone?’ chestnut (a.k.a. the learning disability trump card) for months.
The thought of him having a seizure, in a locked unit, unnoticed, has generated a new level of distress I can’t describe. I don’t care how old he is, and I certainly ain’t treating him like a child, but I want to comfort him, and keep a watchful eye for any further seizures. And I can’t.
“Finding him something to do…”
It was LB’s community team meeting at lunchtime today. He’d refused the farm so talk turned to finding him something to do instead of school. My brain nearly melted.
How can we be in this position of “finding him something to do“? Not just him. Any young learning disabled person? How can we be talking in these terms? Where’s the aspiration? The opportunities? Ironically of course, giving LB choice is an effective way of erasing aspiration from his life; he will choose to stay in bed, watch DVDs and eat loads of cake.
I walked back from the meeting, head reeling. I’d mentioned that we have given thought to LB’s longer term plans (of course), we have got a folder full of residential college brochures that the county council will never fund, we know that local college provision is crap, and that leaves, er, direct payments. Which is where we started.
How can provision be this crap?
Well the walk to the unit kind of (but not really) sheds some light on that question. A 25 minute walk through a local estate to the ring road where the site is. I thought, funnily enough along the way, how this location reflects the status of learning disabled people in society. How much learning disability provision is located on the margins, at the edges of towns and cities? Winterbourne View was on an industrial estate. Leominster day centre is literally next to the dump.
A very recent indication of this status is evident in the endless discussion and jokes in the media, and social media, about the ‘swivel eyed loon’ comment, with barely any reflection on the offensiveness of this comment. It’s almost as if people don’t see it…. because really, and maybe subconsciously, they don’t see learning disabled people as fully human.
I got home and had an email from the Care Manager. I’d chased her up this morning about arranging a meeting to talk about LB’s future plans. She’d emailed me a couple of months ago to say that when someone is about to leave the unit, they have a Care Plan Approach (CPA) meeting to discuss what is going to happen.
Her email said it was being held on June 10th. In less than three weeks time.
Turned out the invitation had been emailed to various professionals last week with a note at the bottom saying:
Please let me know if anyone else should be invited to this meeting.
No words. Just tears of frustration and rage and despair.
mydaftlife 