The Good, The Bad, and the Hallucinations

I've just caught up on some sleep that I desperately needed. I told myself when I started the SW program that I was going to try to avoid at all costs staying up late doing schoolwork. I often have trouble thinking clearly as it is (hormones) so adding lack of sleep to my taxed bird brain is just not a good idea. I violated that "pact" with myself this week trying to get a paper done that was due yesterday. For academic writing, I need lots of time to write many drafts and go over it many many times. I didn't have enough hours this past week to tackle this paper like I should have. I have to make critical choices every week about how to spend my time, and I haven't wanted SW to get in the way of my other priorities in life. It has gotten in the way this week, specifically with my priority of sleeping.

I had done the best I could drafting this paper on how the NASW Code of Ethics is limited in the support of policy practice. Wednesday I stayed up really late and got up really early working on the paper. Then Thursday rolled around and it was crunch time-I had to finish up and do whatever it took to get it done. Thursday, however, was a very busy day. Grace is now in choir at church every Thursday from 5:00-5:45 PM. This poses a scheduling dilemma for David and me, as in, who takes off work early to take her to choir every week. It's something I want to do, so I've done it the last two times. I wouldn't have traded this past Thursday for anything. It was a beautiful day and while Grace was in choir, Johnny and I had a relaxed time walking around Franklin Street. We discovered a new Halloween store right beside Schoolkids Records that I highly recommend--and it sure beats driving all the way to Southpoint Mall. We had a blast looking at all the costumes and masks for grownups and kids. Grace and I already know we're both going to be Cinderella this year, but Johnny and David are having a hard time narrowing down their options. It was fun kicking it on Frankin Street with Johnny, something I had never really done before.

After choir, I drove the kids to Weaver Street to meet David for their standing Thursday evening thing. He was there drinking a beer and I sat down long enough to have one too before facing the realities of the rest of my evening. You probably think that I left Weaver Street to go work on my paper, but that's not what happened. I left Weaver Street to drive to a Speech Pathologist's office to receive a comprehensive report on the results of Grace's evaluation regarding her Auditory Processing disorder. That whole thing is a blog post in itself (about how Grace was first seen in May, then again in Aug. and how the therapist canceled one appointment with me and simply wouldn't return my calls or written notes and how I was getting increasingly pissed because Kindergarten has been in session for a month and Grace's team has been waiting on this report to help guide her interventions...)

But--I showed up Thursday at 7:00 for what turned out to be a very good, detailed, comprehensive report on Grace's strengths, deficiencies and interventions that we need to put into place NOW rather than waiting until 2nd or 3rd grade when she begins to really struggle. At 8:15 PM I began slowly inching out of the therapist's office, anxious about how I was going to get this paper done. I got home, helped put this kids to sleep and then at 9:30 PM picked my paper back up again. I use my gmail account a lot by e-mailing drafts of documents to myself that I can work on a little here, a little there, a little wherever I can. So I logged onto gmail and opened the latest draft that I had e-mailed myself. As tired as I was, I knew I that this was it and that I had to push on through to get this freakin thing done. David stayed up with me awhile working on his own stuff and around 11:00 PM I began to break out into hives all over my body. I was itching everywhere and when I checked myself out in the mirror, I found red welts all over my body. Can stress bring out hives? Something brought them out and for the rest of the night, my fingers were busier than they have ever been in my whole life, alternating between scratching and typing, typing and scratching.

At 3:00 AM I was 4.7/5 finished with my paper. I needed to finish my concluding paragraph, do the title page and the reference page. I was spent and I needed to sleep. I printed out what I'd done so far and headed down the hall to the bedrooms. David was snoring so I went to Johnny's room. Johnny was sleeping in Grace's bed and Grace was sleeping on the floor in her room. I threw 3 weeks' of clean, unfolded laundry off of Johnny's bed onto the floor and as I crawled under the homemade quilt, I realized there were no sheets on Johnny's bed. I got settled on top of the quilt and pulled a clean sheet off the pile on the floor to cover up with. As I got settled in, my eyes gazed on Johnny's door right around the doorknob. I saw this small, black, furry ball creeping down his door slowly. I looked closer. Creep, creep. I turned the light on and nothing was creeping down the door. I turned the light off and the creeping started back. WTF? Light back on, no creeping. Light back off, creeping. I didn't have time for this hallucinatory-nonsense, so I made peace with it, and fell asleep. Until 5:30 AM.

Woke up at 5:30, came in to open the draft of the paper that I had saved 2.5 hours earlier but it wasn't there. I searched all over the computer in every way I knew how until about 6:00 when I made David come help me. He couldn't find the document either. Then I figured out what had happened. When I'd opened the document from gmail, from the internet, even though I'd saved it, I'd forgotten to save it on the desktop or in My Documents, so when I'd saved it, I'd saved it onto some unknown server out in CyberSpace. It was 6:30 and I need to e-mail the paper to my professor before 8:15 when I needed to leave for class. I thought about going to Kinko's with my printed out version so they could scan it in. Frustrated, David admonished me for letting something so underclassmanly cliche happen but gave me hope by suggesting I could probably just type it all over again. That's what I did.

From 6:45 AM to 8:15ish, I feverishly re-typed the paper I'd printed out, and I finished the title page and reference list. I've never been so focused in my life. Grace and Johnny were coming in asking me if they could take this or that to show and tell ("Yeah, sure"), asking me to read the new Dora book ("No, not now. DAVID! Please get them out of here!") and asking if they could wear their new shoes to school without socks on ("YES! Now, run along.) I wouldn't have known if they'd both gone to school without their pants on, and if I'd known, I wouldn't have cared.

At 8:15 AM, I e-mailed the paper to my professor, jumped in the shower, and was out the door by 8:32 AM. Arriving 12 minutes late to class, it was enough for my classmates to check at break if everything was ok, but not late enough that I stood out alone. Two people came in after me. I mostly regretted that I hadn't been able to check one last time for typing errors, but it was either do that or risk getting docked for the paper being late.

After my sleepless, stressful morning from hell, my troubles instantly melted away when I got my first paper back from my second class and discovered I'd made a perfect score. In addition to saying it was an excellent paper, my professor added,

I'm glad to hear that you're actively thinking of ways to decrease your stress level~this graduate program is very demanding and you'll enjoy it more and get more out of it if you can devote adequate time and attention to it.

This paper was an analysis of our personal genograms (family histories and patterns of relationships, medical issues, etc.) as well as our personal ecomaps, (visual representations of the supports and stressors in our lives). I'll leave you with my last sentence of that first paper, the essence pretty much summing up my personal motto:

I am better equipped to make decisions about how to balance my time and energies. I realize, and can apply to clients and their families, that at any given stage we are both the products of intergenerational influences over which we had no control and critical choices that we make every day. With this knowledge I will encourage my clients to live as I do, doing the best with what I have.