Walking away

I just recently walked away from a job that even though I had not been there that long, it was my favorite out of any that I have ever had. The company I worked for provided residential and day services for adults with mental retardation and developmental disabilities. I worked the residential side in a home where three wonderful ladies lived. Although the job itself could be very stressful I loved it…and I loved what I was doing for these ladies. There were a few parts that I did not like at all though…

I worked during the week and I had another staff that worked on the weekends in this house. I knew from the beginning that she was a little odd, but hey, so am I sometimes! After returning to the home after she had completed her first several shifts I began to understand why I had that feeling. The girls complained a lot about how she didn’t do things like me and I noticed the the house was kind of a mess, like nothing had been cleaned in my absence. I was nice though and just chalked up to the fact that maybe she just didn’t enough time training with me so I made sure and left her several notes of things that I hadn’t got to tell her.

After a few weeks it only continued to get worse though. And I continued to leave notes every week and it’s like she just threw them in the trash. The girls complained every waking minute about this staff so I would write down what they would say and send it to the office… but they never did anything about it. It wasn’t just about not doing things the way I do them anymore either. She dropped one of the girls that was wheel chair bound many times and she would leave her lying in bed or sitting in her chair in soiled diapers for hours. And she would tell one of the other ladies in a wheel chair that they were fat and if they lost weight they would be able to get around easier so she wouldn’t assist when they needed it.

She also did things to me…she gave me scabies…yes you read that correctly SCABIES. She brought some foam mattress topper to go on top of the mattress in the staff bedroom (yes we sleep there) and the first night after I slept on it in the morning I was incredibly itchy. And yes I did choose to sleep on it but you would too, because that mattress was so bad I could feel every spring in it and it was nice a have, even if just a little, relief from that. So after I had gone to the doctor and been treated for scabies, which I still really hoped was just bed bugs because scabies sounds like an STD, the treatment worked so I threw the mattress topper away and sprayed everything imaginable with disinfectant spray. I went to the office and showed them the “bites” and demanded a new mattress. Besides making me itchy she also would do the grocery shopping and even though I would have menus planned and I whole grocery list made for her she never bought everything I needed. I always ended up having to change my meals around or buy things with my own money.

This went on for weeks and I continued to complain about her and so did the girls but still nothing was done. I have anxiety issues big time and I was already on the max dose of the medication I am taking to control it, but because of this staff Monday afternoons when I got to the home were always AWFUL!!! I would see how much of my grocery list she didn’t buy and I would see the whole house filthy and that she left wet (urine) bedding just lying around their rooms all day so it stank horribly and this would cause me to have panic attacks. Most were relatively mild but there were a few where I called the office yelling, screaming, and crying. She was not treating those girls right and she was not respecting me at all.

I see a therapist for my anxiety every three weeks or so and when I was telling her about what was going on at work and how I was just losing my cool every Monday, she said something that really struck me. She told me that because of the things I had been telling her she may have to report this staff member to Adult Protective Services(APS). The company I work for has a system in place for when things are like this and policy states that I am to notify a supervisor and they are to contact APS. Now I had done that many, many times and they were still doing nothing about it. I begin to think that if my therapist may have to turn this woman in just based on what I am telling her and no supervisors had done it maybe it was time to take matters into my own hands.

I contacted APS and reported her and they told me it was confidential unless it went to trial and I would be notified if she was going to be investigated. Well so much for confidential, someone called the director of the company and told her so she started questioning any of her staff that went to the office. A few days later one of the ladies in my house was having issues and made the courageous decision to seek help and go to a hospital to be evaluated. When she returned to the home she was still very upset  and didn’t want to sleep and of course I love these ladies to death and I didn’t want to see any harm come to them so I was prepared to stay up all night if need be. She said it might help if she could talk to someone else. So I called our after hours emergency number and the director answered and said that she was fine and to make her go to bed and that I needed to clock out.

And that was it, I knew right then and there that I was done. I could not continue to work for a company that treated its clients this way. I can not and will not stand behind a company that treats people, disabled or not, like they have. Later that day I went to the office and told them that I was quitting as of that day and that I was the one that called APS even though I shouldn’t have had to be the one to do it. For the safety of the ladies, I still wanted the other staff gone whether I was there or not and I am still fighting to get her out of there. Hopefully I don’t have to resort to doing something awful like slashing all her tires and putting sugar in her gas tank since her car is a car/house and that would completely immobilize her, without hurting her physically of course, I’m not that horrible LOL.

Not a day goes by though that I don’t think about those girls (I keep saying girls but really they were women way older than me) and worry if I made the wrong choice. Ultimately I made the choice for me though, damn that moral fiber! I am still able to visit with them a little though and I am keeping up on what’s going on with the investigation. This was one of the toughest decisions I have ever had to make in my life but I am lucky because my husband and family stood by me 100%. I’m still getting back into the swing of things as stay at home mom and I will find another job sometime, but it won’t ever be the same. I am so grateful for all the time I got to spend with these amazing individuals and not only for how much I taught them but also for how much they taught me.