off-form

My female owner is trying to get into a regular work routine, i.e. to start work/ study etc at about 0900hr every day and end about 2200hr at night. There are, of course, lunch/ dinner breaks. That sounds like torture, coz it’s technically 11hrs a day (if you take away 2 hrs for meals). But she figures that she often has long breaks in-between clients and so, the actual number of hours of work she puts in is still about 8-9hrs a day.

She tried this again today and found it more exhausting than other days. Some reasons being, she really started working at 0900hr by calling a child safety officer. Then she rushed around trying to prepare for her supervision and three client sessions. Despite the early head start, my female owner found herself racing against time.

Her supervision session at 1400hr didn’t go well because she totally missed out doing a suicide risk assessment for a teenager who was brought in last week for a seemingly unrelated purpose. It was just that she talked about previous self-harm behaviour and my female owner did not pick up on that. Still, her supervisor’s reproach made her feel as if she committed the worst cardinal sin a psychologist can ever commit.

Then, her insomnic client at 1600hr did not improve her sleeping hours from the previous week but that’s probably to be expected since she had made most of the gains in the early parts of the therapy. My female owner didn’t know what else to do besides the usual stuff and ended therapy after 30mins. She was brain-dead, seriously.

Next up her schedule is her one-week old anxious client at 1715hr. For the first time, she was late for her appointment. After the 1600hr appointment, she had gone off to recharge herself in a small room but as usual, was slow in coming out. Anxious client was a charming young Italian lad. Oh, so cute. She perked up a little.

Finally, her 1900hr parent-client (of the teenager mentioned earlier). They came early and so she found them waiting for her after she closed off the previous client. Not much of a break there, but she loaded a parenting video for them to watch while she retreated to the small room to prepare for the session. Hurhur. Really last minute work.

Her session ended at 2030. Even then, she couldn’t go home, because she had to write case notes. Her remaining brain juice for the day allowed her to scribble some notes for the parent-client before she called it a night at 2130hr at the clinic. And you are so wrong, if you thought she went home. She headed to the library to borrow some treatment books.. and left only when the librarian announced that the library was closing.

There you have it… a long and off-form day, with some work still undone.. My female owner figured that it’s a bad idea to put three clients and a supervision session back-to-back but she don’t really have a choice, as she needs to “up her hours”. More on that tomorrow… I’m going to bed now. It’s a long entry and my little paws are tired.