#109 - The Social Worker is Getting a Social Worker

Here is my thought about being a clinical social worker:

Nothing except the Grace of God makes the difference regarding which side of the desk you are sitting at during a counseling session.

In order to separate the professionals from the folks coming in for help...

labels are given:

patients...

which morphed into clients...

and I recall during some of my time in graduate school that there was talk of using the term consumers.

I think that type of terminology is pretty darn silly.

You are grieving and you need help through it...

so you become a client?

You have been horribly abused and are seeking help with the healing...

does that really make you a patient?

And that consumer nonsense...

please let's not go there.

So when I would sense that someone was feeling a huge canyon between us during a counseling session...

I would remind them that we are just all people.

That I was there for that person to help them along the journey...

that I didn't have all the answers and actually, if counseling went well...

they would discover that many answers were already waiting within themselves.

I liked to think of myself as a partner on the journey to awareness.

On good days on the job, I might actually be present when someone obtained a breath of enlightenment...

or I could witness the lightening of a heavy burden...

or see a smile that had long been gone.

All the bad things that happen to people, no one is immune from such things. And people need to remember that when they go for counseling.

Save for the Grace of God there is no difference between you and me.

And evebn with the Grace of God...

most of us get wallopped by life some time or another.

Now I will take the rose colored glasses off.

Because when it came to be my turn to have someone help me...

I kicked, screamed, and ranted rather rudely at a poor nurse on the phone line who was trying to link me up with a social worker for case management.

This happened about three years ago.

I was six months into being diagnosed with systemic lupus, depressed beyond the beyonds...

thinking that any day now I would walk out of this nightmare and go back to work and my "old" life.

I had convinced myself that I had lupus the way someone might have the flu.

I was still in a "Get Well Soon" mentality, and I resented anyone even alluding to my reality which is that I have a serious health challenge...

and that I desperately needed help.

When I got the call from my insurance company's nurse...

I blew up.

In the past year I had been through an MS scare, a Lyphoma scare, an oh it's "only" fibromyalgia to, " um... gee lady, you got lupus."

Those of you with lupus know the roller coaster ride.

A kerjillion tests that invade your person, being poked prodded and usually dismissed by a handful of specialists, watching family and friends grow frustrated with you because you are not "yourself" any more...

and watching everything that you held dear start slipping away...

you career, your social life, your ability to maintain your home, your ability as a parent, spouse, friend, sister, daughter...

whooosh...

vanishing.

So you build yourself up like a boxer in the world's biggest, longest battle...

and fight, fight, fight day in and day out with yourself and anybody near you...

just to try to be "normal" again.

And then some wise guy from an insurance company (that undoubtedly has given you a share of grief over the ever-increasing bills)...

well, now they want to pry into that carefully built armor and try to start telling you what to do?!!!

ARGHHHHH!

So I "ARGGGGH'd" at the nurse, told her, " I AM A SOCIAL WORKER... I DON'T NEED ONE DAMMIT!" and hung up on her.

Three years later...

Lo and behold I get "the call" again from a nurse representing my insurance company.

I am in a better space now...

not what I would call a good space...

but, ready to say, "Okie-dokie this social worker needs a social worker."

What changed?

Hmmm...

three years of witnessing my husband take on the lion's share of household responsibilities while I continued to pretend that I would be better any day now?

Three years of watching my child from age 4 through 7 learn how to adjust to a mommy who is usually bed ridden, on the couch or just plain "out of it"?

Or should I mention the guilt that comes with all of this?

Huge solid lumps of guilt washed down with humble pie and large gulps of pride swallowing.

Yeah...

that about sums it up.

So I tell the phone nurse, "Yes, I need a case manager, a social worker...uh... please."

And then the phone interview begins.

(You know, nothing is ever easy is it?)

Thirty minutes of question after question...

and all of these questions are reminders of what I do not like to contemplate...

Here's a sample:

"Do you have your living will prepared?"

(oh...um... this thing is going to kill me isn't it?)

"Do you know the signs of a heart attack?"

(er... oh, yes... now I remember that lecture from the rheumatologist... how did it go?)

So phone nurse grilled me on the heart thing...

and turned up the volume on me because I have frequent bouts of chest and jaw pain.

Ya!Ya!Ya!

(Once again, if you have lupus AND fibromyalgia... it's really, really hard to know which pain is a heart attack thingy. I happen to have costochondriasis... which is the chronic inflammation of the cartilage that holds your rib cage together... oh, and TMJ... and thoracic outlet syndrome... which frequently cuts off the circulation to my left arm...

SO EXCUSE ME IF I DON'T CALL THE EMERGENCY ROOM EVERY TIME I HURT!!!!)

Back to our regular programming.

Phone nurse gives up on me...

mumbles you better get back to your cardiologist and commences with grilling me about strokes.

(I hesitate to tell her that this phone interview is giving me a stroke. I know my lupus pals who actually have had a stroke... or many strokes... would know I am being overly dramatic... and I would not want to trivialize the reality of lupus.)

I tick off the list of stroke symptoms...

and the phone nurse corrects me because I missed a few.

Before I can interject that the lupus effects my cognitive (thinking) skills,

(in particular, my memory, word recall... also known as aphasia... and making STUPID LISTS!)

phone nurse lectures me about cognitive problems and lupus.

(Duh. No kidding, lady.)

Then I get the kidney lecture. Do you have any idea how many people with lupus wind up on dialysis?

And the blood draws because you're on chemotherapy lecture...

I am growing fidgety and inattentive by this time.

Phone nurse asks me what cognitive deficits I have with lupus...

I tell her attention span, and we leave it at that.

So what about depression, she asks.

YES I AM DEPRESSED!!!

Phone nurse is getting annoyed with me now...

can you blame her

and asks...

What are you doing about that?

(hmmm... trying avoid talking to people like you who like to remind me that I know the number of the bus that is going to hit me and send me to Heaven's gate... you know a bus called L-U-P-U-S?)

I tell her I am doing what needs to be done to cope with the depression.

More questions... do you find it hard to enjoy things, favorite activities...

"No," I politely tell her... trying to make nice-nice for being grouchy.

(But, I am thinking... I know how to have fun... lupus keeps getting in the way...ARRRGH!)

I think I am starting to scare her now, which is a really good thing because I want this phone conversation to end.

I get some more lectures about the doctors I should of, could of, would of seen if they were doing their jobs correctly...

and she reminds me to be a good girl and take my pills four times a day...

all 16 of them

(and that's on a good day)

I wrap the whole thing up before she reminds me of something else that makes me feel miserable and she agrees to assign a social worker to me.

"Well, thank you!" I chirp.

(See? See how happy I am? Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! Now go away scary Nurse lady.)

" Anything else?" she asks me.

"Nope," I respond....

but, there is one thing I DID want to say...

I didn't say it to her, but I will say it here:

Nothing except the Grace of God, Ms. Nurse, makes the difference between which end of the phone line we are on today.

Now could someone please get me a cookie?


Loretta Kelly, B.S.Ed., M.S.W.

copyright 2007