Time for another story. Pearl. She wound-up being a classic Katy Intake.
Working the shelter was a lot like working in an emergency room. Long periods of boredom punctuated by heart-thumping intensity. You never knew what to expect when the phone rang.
In the early days the phone set-up was pretty crude. When I started out at Chrysalis we only had 2 phone lines, one for each major populated region of the county. That necessitated having two phones, the "old-fashioned" sort with a dial pad and a receiver connected by a curly cord. Do they even make them anymore? At least they didn't have a rotary dial! They may have been advanced enough to have a "hold" button. I really don't remember.
What I do remember, as I said, is that we only had 2 phones lines. There was no dedicated office line or personal resident line. That meant that a phone call could be anything - an administrative matter, a personal call for a staff member or resident, or you would answer the phone and be ushered straight into some one's worst nightmare. Some women would call and ask for help with the abuser fuming in the background. We had a policy. If the threat was immediate the caller was advised to call the police and/or get to a safe place BEFORE talking to us. We never tried to "talk down" the abuser or defuse tense situations. I never did it, but if the situation seemed really bad the staff would try to keep the imperiled person on one phone while calling the police on the other.
Most often, though, the women would call when it was safe - immediately after an incident or when the tension was just starting to build and they were alone. They would call looking for support, legal advice, or a shoulder to cry on. Many never came to the shelter.
What I remember about Pearl was that she was so sad. Her voice was timid, she was often tearful, and she just sounded like a lost soul. She was so broken-down she couldn't see any way out of her situation.
A quick word about abusers. (NOTE: in my world the abuser will be "he" and the victim "she." Same-sex relationships really weren't on the radar yet, I don't remember encountering any at the shelter, and while I know there are women who abuse men I still believe it's not as common and has a somewhat different dynamic. So there.) Abusers, like most things in life, occur on a spectrum: what I liked to call "ignorant drunk" through "crazy son-of-a-bitch." The ignorant drunk is usually none-too-bright and only acts up when drinking (hence the name) or presented with some other external pressure such as money problems. They may actually feel remorse for their actions but just don't know how to cope. The crazy sons-of-bitches are the scary ones. They seem to enjoy inflicting pain and get off on dominating their partner. They are dangerous.
Pearl's husband tended towards the latter. He was quite violent and had her pinned psychologically.
Pearl would call to talk but resisted coming to the shelter. She did agree to meet with a staff person once. Pearl's husband had attacked her with a pair of scissors and she had fended him off, suffering cuts on her arms in the process. Cindy, the staff person who met her, suggested that she come to the shelter, but insisted that she get medical attention for her arms first because the wounds were not particularly fresh and they were, well, disgusting. Pearl refused.
It was a beautiful, sunny September day when she called me. If I remember correctly it was my future husband's birthday, so I was probably all a-twitter about making celebration plans and hoping to skate through a reasonably easy work shift. Then Pearl called. Her husband had just beaten her and then had left the house. She wanted to leave. She agreed to come to the shelter.
Keeping a secret location was part of our security, so we always picked women up at the local police station or any public location they could get to. There was a shopping center near where Pearl lived. I agreed to meet her there.
OK. She was not what I expected when I pulled up. Imagine, if you will, a size 16 person wedged into size 12 stretchy, leopard-skin print pants topped with a striped shirt. There may have even been a ratty fur coat involved in the picture, also. She clutched a few possessions in a plastic grocery bag. She was distraught.
As stated before, she had been beaten up that morning. There were no marks on her face but I remember her telling me that her husband had kicked her in the ribs. As we were riding in the car she started complaining that her chest hurt, and she was having trouble breathing. I tried to remain calm but in my head I started speculating whether maybe she had broken ribs and a punctured lung. Then her eyelids fluttered and she passed-out. I called her name repeatedly and she didn't respond.
Now I really was fighting panic. I was driving, so I couldn't just reach over and check for vital signs. My imagination started getting away from me. Now it wasn't just a punctured lung, but horrible internal injuries. Was she even still alive? "OH MY GOD, A WOMAN MAY HAVE JUST DIED IN MY CAR AND IT'S MY BOYFRIEND'S BIRTHDAY, NO LESS!"
I decided it would be faster to just drive to the hospital rather than pull-over and look for help. Cell phones did not exist yet.
I think I pulled up to the ambulance entrance and raced into the hospital babbling about an unconscious woman in my car. She was trundled into a wheelchair and we were directed to the registration room with all of the other sad cases. Still on overdrive, I breathlessly explained that I was from the shelter and this woman had been assaulted and she was having trouble breathing and...
The attending nurse calmly checked Pearl's vital signs, started wheeling her away, then turned to me scornfully and snapped "she's DRUNK!"
Oh.
I think Pearl had some bruised ribs, but her injuries weren't too severe. She may have come to the shelter but I'm pretty sure she didn't last there.
The Katy Intake strikes again.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Sanity is in the Eye of the Beholder
Back to the beginning. As I said at the outset, I started at Chrysalis House as a practicum placement my senior year in college, and, as I also stated earlier, that education really did nothing to prepare me to work at the shelter. Being almost 22 years old, however, I didn't know that.
The first few weeks were somewhat awkward since Theresa, the director, didn't really know what to do with us. One time we hung posters around town advertising the support groups. Since the college loaned us a car to get to the shelter, we were also asked to run the residents around on a lot of errands. It felt like busy work to Cynthia, my fellow intern from the psych practicum, and me.
At one point we decided we would hold a parenting group for the shelter residents. Today I'm amazed at the chutzpah it took to think that we could do that. We were two idealistic college students who clearly did not have children or any similarity to the residents' backgrounds. I think we only tried it once and learned our lesson.
We must have said something to Theresa about feeling underutilized. What we didn't know at the time was that taking people on errands was actually a fairly significant chunk of the real job since there was no effective mass-transit system. The other thing we didn't know was that Theresa had a sweet, passive-aggressive edge. I remember her turning to us one afternoon and saying she had a special task for us. There was a woman at the homeless shelter who reported being in a violent relationship, so the homeless shelter, Safe Haven, wanted to know if she could come to Chrysalis. The problem was that, although she was receiving treatment, she was schizophrenic. Theresa wanted us to go talk to her to ascertain whether she was appropriate for the shelter.
This was a big issue for us. None of the staff at Chrysalis had the credentials or training to handle a mental health crisis. Plus the fact that the residents lived in very close quarters. It was probably stressful enough to be in the shelter without living with someone who was prone to outbursts or hearing voices. There was a public mental health agency we could turn to, I'll call them The Help Center, but we didn't hold them in very high regard. Mostly they seemed to go out of their way to NOT travel to meet any potential clients. Active mental illness, therefore, meant being a DNS - Do Not Shelter.
An aside - this was, and probably still is, a gaping hole in our mental health system. There needs to be emergency shelters that specifically cater to people with mental issues who may not require full-on hospitalization.
So Theresa innocently asked us to assess this woman's mental status because we were, after all, psychology students. I swear there was a glint in her eye. She probably knew all along that we were pretty ignorant of the real world.
So Cynthia and I did it. We went to the homeless shelter and talked to Mary. (Visiting the homeless shelter was in itself an adventure since it was in a pretty intense housing project.) Mary was a petite, upper-middle-aged woman with bottle-blonde hair. What I remember about her was that she was pretty quiet. She was stretched out on her bed clutching a pillow. I have no recollection what we talked about, but there was no loosening of associations, tangental speech, or word salad, so we thought she was fine. We returned to Chrysalis and reported to Theresa that she should come to the shelter.
Mary lasted less than 24 hours. She got kinda freaked-out her first night there and returned home.
She was the first of what came to be considered "Katy Intakes." My co-workers learned to be wary of Katy Intakes. The people I cleared for shelter had a higher-than-usual chance of having mental problems. Mary did return to the shelter at least one other time. There was also Donna, the developmentally disabled woman with bulemia, Christy, the wide-eyed waif with bipolar disorder, and Holly, who actually did get hauled from the shelter to the psych ward by The Help Center after having a conversation with herself in multiple voices. And these are only the ones I can remember right off the top of my head.
I apparently lack what can only be called "crazy radar." I have a high tolerance for different behavior, I guess, and so it rings no warning bells. What some people would call pathological I consider to be merely eccentric. What does that say about me?
I'm still pondering that one.
The first few weeks were somewhat awkward since Theresa, the director, didn't really know what to do with us. One time we hung posters around town advertising the support groups. Since the college loaned us a car to get to the shelter, we were also asked to run the residents around on a lot of errands. It felt like busy work to Cynthia, my fellow intern from the psych practicum, and me.
At one point we decided we would hold a parenting group for the shelter residents. Today I'm amazed at the chutzpah it took to think that we could do that. We were two idealistic college students who clearly did not have children or any similarity to the residents' backgrounds. I think we only tried it once and learned our lesson.
We must have said something to Theresa about feeling underutilized. What we didn't know at the time was that taking people on errands was actually a fairly significant chunk of the real job since there was no effective mass-transit system. The other thing we didn't know was that Theresa had a sweet, passive-aggressive edge. I remember her turning to us one afternoon and saying she had a special task for us. There was a woman at the homeless shelter who reported being in a violent relationship, so the homeless shelter, Safe Haven, wanted to know if she could come to Chrysalis. The problem was that, although she was receiving treatment, she was schizophrenic. Theresa wanted us to go talk to her to ascertain whether she was appropriate for the shelter.
This was a big issue for us. None of the staff at Chrysalis had the credentials or training to handle a mental health crisis. Plus the fact that the residents lived in very close quarters. It was probably stressful enough to be in the shelter without living with someone who was prone to outbursts or hearing voices. There was a public mental health agency we could turn to, I'll call them The Help Center, but we didn't hold them in very high regard. Mostly they seemed to go out of their way to NOT travel to meet any potential clients. Active mental illness, therefore, meant being a DNS - Do Not Shelter.
An aside - this was, and probably still is, a gaping hole in our mental health system. There needs to be emergency shelters that specifically cater to people with mental issues who may not require full-on hospitalization.
So Theresa innocently asked us to assess this woman's mental status because we were, after all, psychology students. I swear there was a glint in her eye. She probably knew all along that we were pretty ignorant of the real world.
So Cynthia and I did it. We went to the homeless shelter and talked to Mary. (Visiting the homeless shelter was in itself an adventure since it was in a pretty intense housing project.) Mary was a petite, upper-middle-aged woman with bottle-blonde hair. What I remember about her was that she was pretty quiet. She was stretched out on her bed clutching a pillow. I have no recollection what we talked about, but there was no loosening of associations, tangental speech, or word salad, so we thought she was fine. We returned to Chrysalis and reported to Theresa that she should come to the shelter.
Mary lasted less than 24 hours. She got kinda freaked-out her first night there and returned home.
She was the first of what came to be considered "Katy Intakes." My co-workers learned to be wary of Katy Intakes. The people I cleared for shelter had a higher-than-usual chance of having mental problems. Mary did return to the shelter at least one other time. There was also Donna, the developmentally disabled woman with bulemia, Christy, the wide-eyed waif with bipolar disorder, and Holly, who actually did get hauled from the shelter to the psych ward by The Help Center after having a conversation with herself in multiple voices. And these are only the ones I can remember right off the top of my head.
I apparently lack what can only be called "crazy radar." I have a high tolerance for different behavior, I guess, and so it rings no warning bells. What some people would call pathological I consider to be merely eccentric. What does that say about me?
I'm still pondering that one.
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