joe, adam, sam, henry... and the God who hears me.

So I finally have something that is definitley worth blogging about, but the blog will take somewhat of a amount of background info, so hang in there, its gunna be worth it...

I am back on the train... yes by train I mean the hellth train, the first week didn't go as well as expected but i am hoping to make a comeback this week, anyway, thats besides the main point..

ok so I have been working at this place called Seneca Cayuga ARC, which i know tells you nothing about what I actually do but yeah I am a NOW Certified Skills Instructor, I work in a residential house with 4 guys between the ages of 25 and 62 who have developmental disabilities and I teach them different skills like making dinner, doing chores, going into the community..etc..they all have goals that they have to work on, and the point is to try to encourage and facilitate independence, and the agency has different levels of living in which they can advance to depending on their growth and skill development in independent living, anyway let me just tell you a little bit about each of them...

Individual A...We will just call him Joe for reference sake, now joe is about 32 (guess) and Joe is very ADHD and can't focus on anything... he s pretty independent, he can walk, talk fine, make his own lunch and breakfast with no real huge assistance... so now you are thinking "oh well thats not bad, I think I have a friend who is ADHD" or "I think I am ADHD"...no...no... this is way beyond what I could even imagine ADHD... this is like NON STOP energy, primarily focused on young females.... yes thats right ...meeeee and its not like a little crush that you think is cute and flattering, it was cute for like 1 day, I kid you not and now I can't think of a day when I haven't imagined myself throwing him out of a moving vehicle, he practices my patience, EVERY SINGLE DAY! and it never stops, its not like he bugs me 5 times or ten times a day, he is 2 feet from me at every second of the day....."Kithtal want to go out to dinner" kithtal can i go buy you a soda" kithtal can I help you with dinner" "Kithtal wanna go outside and play basketball?" Kithtal can you dry my feet" "no joe you can dry your own feet" "Kithtal but i like it when you do it" (I have never dried the guy's feet in my life) or... he will just stand in the doorway to the office and have "stare at kithtal time" There was one day i swear he asked me if he could go to the grocery store with me 27 times, i counted... and the thing is, he can't focus on anything, but he can focus on me for my whole 8 hour shift, we have to check to make sure he gets the soap out of his hair when he showers becuase he will just get bored and not rinse it enough, but if rinsing his hair was somehow equivalent to staring at kithtal, we would never have to worry about it.. Anyway, thats joe.
Individual B, and we will call him Adam, now adam is young, 26 years old. and he i fairly ambulatory, he can walk for short periods of time but utilizes a wheel chair for traveling and unfortionatly to come to the office for his meds and for coming to the dinner table because he is LAZY! He is a great guy, don't get me wrong , he always wants to know how you are doing, and he wants to help you out... but not too much, he spends most of his time playing video games, sleeping, listening to michael jackson. On sunday he doesn't usually get out of his bed until 7 pm and eats dinner and goes right back to bed. Pretty easy life huh? yeah and he is offered so many opportunities to get out but he doesn't want to go anywhere unless he can buy something, and he doesn't have a job because he says "its too hard" ... But then on the other side he will complain about how crappy his life is and say " I can't take this anymore, I wanna just get in a cab and leave, im so stressed" "you people treat me like a baby"... little does he know he actually likes to be treated like a baby because he never wants to do anything for himself.. like the other day, he asked for more pizza and I said "well give me your plate" (fully capable) and he just looks at his plate and looks up at me and i said "lift it up off the table and give it to me" he lifts it about a half an inch and i said "no reach"... he finally did with the help with the individual sitting next to him, he was also frustrated with Adam's laziness...
Individual C... and we will just call him Sam. Sam is older prolly around 64 and he is on dialysis and has kidney failure, so he has a very strict diet. Sam loves to cut out coupons, watch scary cop movies on tv, sticking stickers on paper, and of course making lots of beaded necklaces, of which i have recieved as gifts lots of times... I usually keep my favorites and then re-gift them back to Sam by cutting the string and giving him what he thinks are new beads. Sam is a good guy he loves to give you gifts and make you laugh, and let me tell you this guy has the most adorable laugh, sometimes when he laughs, I cry because he is just so precious. Sam has a walker, and he walks pretty fast, especially when he is angry, ad he uses a wheelchair to travel. Sam, because of dialysis and his strict diet, he can only drink about 20 ounces of water a day. So he is very sneaky and he tries to steal containers from the kitchen or his lunch box, and bring it into the bathroom and fill them with water... he actually gets away with it most of the time which is aweful. One time we left the kitchen sink water running because we were trying to defrost some chicken and we come upstairs and he has got his head under the sink drinking the warm water... rediculous... and then when you catch him doing something wrong ...ohhh nooo.. now sam is a pretty quiet guy but when you catch him in the wrong look out he will yell " f-you, go home, sh*t your pants, sh*t on your girlfriends head, f-you, go home" now he will yell all this and loud, and he will throw things, and its pretty scary the first time but now its kinda hard not to laugh at him... and to add to it he has no teeth so you can imagine how funny that yelling sounded, one time he asked me for " gugar" which actually means sugar but how would i know, its my second day, and then when i couldn't understand what he was saying he gives me the whole "sh*t your pants" speal followed by shoving and i mean shoving toast down his throat, i thought he was going to die... but holy cow when he is not yelling he is just so sweet, he cuts out all the sudoku puzzles out of the newspaper for me when i come in for the week, and then even when he does yell a lot of times he will apologize and cry, and give you a beaded necklace... its adorable...
Ok now individual D, who is actually my primary assignment, which i am going to tell you how he use to be and how he is now, we will just call him henry. Ok so henry is like 53 or something. He is completely constrained to a wheelchair. Henry loves to joke around, and he watches a lot of porn..ha yay (sarcasm). Anyway Henry always gave us a hard time with his showers he would wait until the last possible second , the last hour to take a shower when everyone is busy and we are passing meds, and he will just be mumble grumble all day about doing it, everytime we would prompt him to take a shower he would just get mad and grumble about it and then never do it, anything we asked him to do really he would say "I bust my butt at work, now i gotta bust my butt at home" which neither is true, he pretty much sleeps all day at work and then all he ha to do when he comes home is make is lunch and shower...thats it. and he hates it that staff ask him to do stuff, like i said jut mumble grumble all dayyyyy loonnnggg. but then he always thinks all he other individuals should listen to staff, like him and joe go at it all the time cuz henry yells at him when he gets distracted "JOE YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO STAFF" followed by trying to ram into him with his wheel chair... and then joe comes running back to henry with fists flying... yeah that was on my shift... anyway, nothing would motivate him and I would try everything i could to get the guy motivated, i tried reward charts... yeah he doesn't care, i tried telling him that if he took a shower he could go out more... yeah he doesn't really care.. oh i was so mad this one day, i had been asking him to take a shower all day and he said "in a minute" (which means 5 hours...) and then i said well you should prolly take one before dinner and he says "ok, ill come out when i smell dinner" and im like "henry you need to take one now in order to get it done before dinner" he says "ok ill be right out" ... so come dinner time he comes strolling out and i had about had enough of him and after dinner im like "ok henry, since your out here why don't you make your lunch for tomorrow" and he was aggravated and he is pounding his fist in the air "first you want me to take a shower, now you want me to make my lunch ahhhh" uughh so i was like "WELL...you haven't done either so ill just stop prompting you alltogether, cuz you don't listen anyway ok?" and he is like "YOU HAVE TO DO YOUR JOB" while pounding his fists on the table" hahaha mannn he is funny though too, one time we were watching some kind of comericial for this ab machine that you velcrow around your stomach and there was like a ripped guy on the tv, and henry was like " i gotta get me one of those, i wonder if it would work for me" and I was like "why you want abs like that henry?" and he said "you bet your boots i do" haha i was laughing so hard.

ANYWAY... Henry has completely changed over the last few weeks, he has gone from our worst behaving individual to our best behaving individual. One day he was starting this acting class, and one of the guys that had to take him was like "if he doesn't atleast do his shower before we have to leave, im not taking him" and in order to not fuel the negative fire i said " don't worry he will" and i went in to talk to henry that night and i was like" ok henry, you really have to take a shower right when you get home if you want to go to that acting class" and he was like " i don't want to" and im thinking... oh great... and he said "cant i take one when i get home" and i said "well henry you could if we knew for sure you actually would but you've proven to us that when you wait til that late, you don't end up taking one and it really important that you take a shower everyday" and he is like "why can't i take a shower in the morning??" and I was like "YOU CANNNNN".....since that day he has taken a shower in the morning everyday... when all hope seemed to be lost... and now this guy his humming in the shower, when i ask him to do something he is like "okey dokey" and im just flabergasted with the difference and i asked him, "what happened why are you all the sudden in such a good mood all the time" and he says "I like it better than when im in a bad mood" and im like MMEE TOOO.... he comes out at dinner time and ays "can i help with anything" and i just don't even know how to respond.. and ive been trying to figure it out, why would just a change of shower time affect so much of his mood change i looked into his meds tried to figure out if they've changed or if he is on more dosages of is happy med, or if he is doing something different at work, and to all the questions it was a no, nothing had changed ... and then i had an epiphany while i was driving home.. while all this was going on, since henry is my primary assignment i have been fervently in prayer for him every night, everytime i got frustrated i would just pray that something would happen that maybe i would find something that he loved to motivate him, or that God would just transform the guy... and all that time I hadnt even thought about how maybe my prayer worked, maybe God heard me, so im drivng home with tears in my eyes at the realization that no meds didn't change henry, no work didn't change henry, no dosage changed, no staff changed him, i didn't change henry, the God who hears my prayers changed henry...... and I didn't even think about that until that moment, how many times do i pray because i just think its the right thing to do or out of routine, and then when my prayers are answerd i try to find credit when the the credit is clearly due to God because he is bigger and more powerful than any medication, any disability, and mood disorder, any tragedy, ANYTHING, He created the world, he redeemed me, he set me free... and he is the last person that i thought about when a miracle happens...
needles to say, i have a much different veiw of the power of prayer!! I'm telling you friends, if he can save me, and if my God can forgive me, and my God can love me, and change me... and change henry whose past has totally destroyed him... He can do anything! HE is MIGHTY to save! (Zephaniah 3:17)

"This is what the Lord says , He who made the earth, the Lord who formed and established it-- The Lord is His Name. 'Call to me and I will answer you, and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.' " -Jeremiah 33:2-3

and whoever made it through this whole blog in one sitting, May God bless you, and your eyes!

love.