More on Fiona

I had a long email from Jane waiting for me when I got to work this a.m.  She has my home email too, but as i often jot a line from work, that must be the one foremost in her memory.  In some ways it eased my mind greatly.  First and foremost, Fiona will return to the Great School in the City.  I was sooooo so worried she would lose her placement. This has happened in the past, I am not just thinking of things to worry about. LOL This hospitalization aside, Fiona has made more strides here and had more people really on her side pulling for her than I have ever seen in the nine years she has been in my heart.  It is comparatively easy to create treatment teams for troubled children and I have seen scads of them for Fiona. Some of them I have been part of.  Sadly none of them really seemed truly functional. They were spin masters who could take the concerns I brought to the meeting and trivialize them.  They could sit there straight faced and tell me Fiona understood her med regime and was comfortable with it.  this after I told them how the child could not stay awake during a visit and had such tremors that she couldn't do a simple craft.  I could give more examples but it isn't really important because it is in the past, and i just didn't want it to become her new present.  And it looks like it won't.

Jane is probably the most amazing person I have ever worked with since I have come to know and love Fiona.  Part of her post to me expressed regret over the incident that happened at school and how she kept replaying it trying to see how it could have been prevented.  I am not being mean when I say no other professional has ever expressed that kind of sentiment to me.  And while they may well have felt it, it helps me to hear it.  I have those feelings too.  When Fiona is in a good phase I always second guess myself wondering if our home could have some how adapted and been a permanent placement for her.  I allow myself to minimize the terror we all felt.  I reframe in my mind the way things happened.  I wonder if I didn't try hard enough, wasn't brave enough.  And I shouldn't.  It is what it is, as my wife is fond of saying. 

Something else that Jane said was so on target.  Fiona is trying to be an 18 year old with the cognitive abilities of an 8 year old.  This coupled with physical, emotional issues, trauma history and oh so much more, make for a mountain for this girl to climb.  At 18 she still runs.  She still rages.  She still tries to self harm.  I don't know how to help her climb that mountain and i am glad Jane will still be part of our lives as we all work this through together.

We have decided that the term "med eval" is how we will address this with my kids.  I talked briefly with Rob about it last night.  He does best with me giving him info in smallish chunks when it is emotionally charged like this.  Today I want to remind him that his aunt (my sister) and his cousin (my niece) were both hospitalized for med evals within the past year.  There are things that make the situations not all that similar beyond the shared aspect of mental health concerns, but I think what he will get from it is that many people face this.  I don't want it to be something he is angry at his sister about and I sense that it could be.