loony bin

This week was a doozy, as in "Watch that first step, it's a....."

At work I got called up to the school to chat with a kiddo that was testing limits. When I got there he sorta flipped out and stormed off on a sort of rampage. Another therapist jumped in to help and the two of us followed the client to see if we could calm him. No dice. He ended up "scuffling" with the other therapist and pushed him against a wall. I thought we were all going to die and sorta had a freak-out of my own. Thankfully I had a radio on me. I called the office for some back-up and the kid eventually calmed down.

To my therapist friends out there...or anyone interested in googling a word:

The client, when he got upset completely dissociated. It was like he wasn't even present during the incident. His breathing was nuts, his posturing was out of control and his eyes were just dead. It was although we were trying to calm an angry, threatened wild animal, instead of a reasonable human being.

It took me a good hour to calm myself down afterwards, the whole time wondering why I hadn't pulled out some of my handy "non-violent" self-defense moves during the incident.

That night, another client broke into our main office with the intent of stealing one of our company vehicles and taking off once it got dark. He was alone in the building for awhile and managed to steal some cash and drink all my diet coke. He tried to hide up in our dropped ceiling, all Mission Impossible like but managed to just damage the ceiling tiles. When he couldn't get the safe open that has our car keys, and couldn't get into the office with all out medications...I think he gave up on the plan. They found him curled up under a desk with some pillows.

This was quite a bit for us to all handle in one week because we don't specialize in kids that usually do this stuff. Because of their behavior, both boys, were transferred the next day to programs that will hopefully be able to help them deal with the things going on with them.

I'm hoping this next week will be nice and calm!