Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (96 page)

We hosted a free school from Minneapolis. I thought the students were unhappy because they didn’t have a whole lot of direction. There was a great deal of liberty that I don’t think the kids wanted. The teachers seemed more interested in theory than in the actual work of teaching. It was incredibly well funded with a staff of twenty-five to 180 kids. There wasn’t much I could say to them. In these situations adults are robbing adolescents of their childhood. Children deserve a chance to be irresponsible, to learn from mistakes. You lose your childhood soon enough in a low-income neighborhood.

I don’t think these kids are capable of being adults—or want to. In some free schools adults are ready to give away their adulthood and take away from students their childhood. It’s fraudulent and becomes chaos. They’re forcing a young person to be older than he really is. The freedom of our school is bounded by two obligations: learning and no violence against another person, physical or emotional. That includes me too.

Our school has sixty-eight students and we’re still too big. I wanted to set the limit at fifty. But I’m too tenderhearted. (laughs.) If someone knocks on our door long enough, they can get it open. I make a distinction between people who deserve to be cared about and some who have completely given up. They don’t deserve the attention because they take too much away from the others, who somehow want to pull some worth out of their lives.

The self-destructive ones deserve someone to completely mother and father them. If someone is willing to commit his or her life to that one person, okay. But not in a classroom with other people who want to care as a group. You see a kid who’s been fine for six months just suddenly collapse, and there’s no way . . . What happens is the other kids spend an awful lot of time ignoring the fact that it’s happening. They expend a lot of energy protecting themselves emotionally—from it catching on to them. A teacher goes through an awful lot of anguish watching someone they care about give up.

I was very upset yesterday. A kid collapsed in October and was sent away for criminal activities. He reappeared on a furlough, begging to come back when he gets out. Though I care about him very much—I don’t know. It’s like a ping-pong game. I haven’t decided.

Grades? I give grades, but they aren’t entered on anything. I simply keep them in mind as a trend . . . Kids like grades, ’cause they like to know where they are right now. Records? No. They have enough records. They have police records, social history records, welfare records. (Laughs.) I should have to keep records?

I think the parents are glad we’re around. We take a great deal of pressure off them. We give them a chance to get on with other things in their lives. We’ve had a lot of families move back South. A great deal of our neighborhood has gone under the bulldozer of urban renewal. Families who haven’t done so well after eight, nine years have now decided they’ll give the South another try. Kids are getting in neighborhood trouble. City life may be just a bit too hard.

We’re really content when our students get a full-time, good paying job. We’re always around for him to learn if he wants to. He’s still interested in learning about himself. He realizes his life doesn’t end when he gets a job. Or when he gets married, his life doesn’t end. He doesn’t end up in heaven or hell because he got married.

From what I’ve read about concentration camps, there’s a similarity in feeling to ghetto areas. The walls aren’t built, they’re there. How your life can become concentrated. Rather than escape from it, I’ve tried to do what some survivors did—find meaning in it to share with other people. Not in any martyr kind of a way, because I can always leave. But it’s something beautiful to me. Being able to be hurt by things and then understanding how it happened and explaining to others who have been hurt by the same things.

I run into people who say how much they admire what I do. It’s embarrassing. I don’t make any judgments about my work, whether it’s great or worthless. It’s just what I do best. It’s the only job I want to do. I work hard because I have to. I get tired. At four I feel as though I’m ready to die. (Laughs.) I don’t feel bad about it. This is my life. I just
am.

 

A hospital is a dehumanizing institution. People get in and they become arms or legs or kidneys or bladders or something besides Joe Smith the human being. If a hospital was a good place for people to work, it would meet the patient’s needs. There would be no need for me.

The nurses, the doctors, the medical students, are set up on a rigid status kind of system. If you buy into this kind of system, you buy the idea that “I’m not quite as good as the guy above me.” The resident doesn’t strike back at the attending man when he has a bad day. He strikes out at the nurse. The nurse strikes out at the hospital aide or the cleaning lady.

Many patients tell me the best person for them has been the cleaning lady. Yet the doctors and nurses, everybody is saying that the cleaning lady just does a rotten job—“That dirt’s been on the floor three days!” The cleaning lady deals with the patient on a human level. She’s scrubbing the floor in the room and the patient says, “My son didn’t come to visit me today.” The cleaning lady smiles and says, “I know how you feel. I know how I’d feel if my son didn’t come to visit me if I was sick.” The cleaning lady doesn’t see the patient as a renal failure or an ileostomy. She just sees a poor lady who’s sick.

Until recently, I wasn’t sure how meaningful my work was. I had doubts. A surgeon does a really beautiful job. That’s meaningful to him
immediately
. But it’s not the kind of sustaining thing that makes a job meaningful. It must concern the relationship you have with the people you work with. We get hung up in the competition: “Who’s responsible for saving this life?” “Who’s responsible for the change in this dying patient?” “Rather than saying, “Isn’t it beautiful that we all together helped make this person’s life better?”

I worked in the leading rehab hospital in the country. The schedule was very rigid. Everybody punches time clocks when they come to work and when they leave. You get so many minutes for coffee break. The patient’s day was regimented as my day was regimented. You have a quadriplegic who at eight o‘clock goes to occupational therapy—nine o’clock goes to physical therapy—ten o‘clock sees the social worker—twelve o’clock goes back to occupational therapy. We see him as a quadriplegic rather than as a person. We’re, both of us, things.

That’s what happens in hospitals—not because people are unfeeling or don’t care, but because they feel put-down. You have to protect yourself in some way. Many things in the institution frustrate me. The doctor who refuses to deal with the patient who knows he’s dying. He says, “He doesn’t want to know anything.” Or the alcoholic with cirrhosis. What’s the use of putting him in this hospital bed, prolonging his life, to send him back to the lonely, isolated world where he’ll sit in his room and drink and nobody to cook for him? You know there’s no place to send him. Or the old lady who’s had a stroke, who lives alone. She’s been very dear to all the staff and you know you can’t keep her in that hundred-dollar-a-day bed, and she’s shipped to some rotten nursing home that welfare put her into. She can’t live alone. And the bastards you have to deal with—sarcastic doctors. They’re not really bastards—it’s the way the institution makes them. You think, “What’s the use?”

For several months I worked with hemiplegics, elderly people who’ve had a stroke. Half their body is paralyzed. First thing in the morning I’d get to the old men’s ward and I’d teach them dressing. They didn’t think they could do anything, but they could dress themselves. If people can take care of themselves, they have more self-esteem.

They were in long wards and they had curtains around the bed. I’d start out with just the shirt, work on getting the affected arm into the sleeve. Some people, it would take ten days to learn. Some could do it in one day—getting their shirt on, their pants on, how to wash themselves with one hand . . . The patients taught me a lot. They have better ways they’ve learned on their own. They’d say, “Wouldn’t it be better if I did it this way?” I learned a lot about self-care from them. I try to tell my students to listen to the patients.

Being sick can be like going through early developmental stages all over again. It can have profound growth potential for people. It’s like being a child again, to be sick. The doctor is like the parent. I’ve seen it happen with kidney transplant patients. People who’ve been seriously ill may come out much stronger, happier . . . Some kind of learning. Something can happen in the sick role. It’s one of the areas where we say it’s okay to be dependent, as an adult, in our society. It’s not intellectual learning.

I think the luxury of individual patients is coming to an end—and I’m glad. Group treatment is far more effective. Patients I’ve worked with helped each other much more than I helped them. If I get five old men together—hemiplegics—and do some crazy thing like tie a red ribbon on their affected arm, it gets to be a game or a joke. They look at what the other guy is doing—he didn’t know he had that side of his body—and say, “Hey, what you’re doing is wrong.” I could say it over and over and over and it wouldn’t mean anything. They learn about survival from each other. They learn it by discussing what their lives were like, what they’re like now. I can’t tell them. I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been paralyzed from the neck down.

The kind of thing we do can be done by anybody in a general hospital. It’s easy for a nurse to learn how a hemiplegic dresses. If they were able to take time with the patient, they could do what I do. The best I am is a good cleaning lady in medicine-surgery.

I had so many doubts about my work. I’d think, Oh God, the doctor doesn’t see what I’m doing as important. I finally learned it didn’t matter what he thought. If I believed in what I was doing, I didn’t give a damn what the doctor thought of it. I began to see his own protective cover.

There’s a doctor who thought we were play-ladies. Occupational therapy uses crafts, fun things. I thought of it as a loss of status. I saw it as not nearly as important as taking temperatures and all these vital, life-saving things. Now I find it exciting, more important than the other matters. I see it as the kind of thing missing in a lot of people’s lives. It wasn’t the people higher up who didn’t recognize the importance of our work. It was
I
who didn’t recognize it.

 

 

When I had resigned from the university, I told them I was as great a pain in the ass to them as they were to me. I didn’t like this rigidity —you have to be here at eight. It doesn’t matter if you stay till ten at night, if you’re one minute late, people will think OTs are not dedicated. I told them to go to hell. They liked my fight, so they said, “What will it take for you to stay?” I said, “A leave of absence.” I think I’ve been good at this job and good for the students. But if I’m not good for me, I’m not good for anybody else.

They needed me, so they got off my back. When I first took this job, they said I couldn’t wear earrings. Only sluts wear pierced earrings. I told them to go to hell. And I said I wouldn’t wear the white uniform. Everyone is supposed to wear it. They said, “Okay, wear a lab coat.” I said, “I won’t wear one.” Now the whole staff isn’t wearing uniforms. This is very destructive in a status-conscious institution that controls people with these kind of things.

Through working on this job I’m coming to learn that I do have some influence, at least over my own happiness. I could have been here, wearing uniforms, fighting, being angry—feeling ridiculous, but helpless. Now I say, “The hell with the uniform.” And I do wear pierced earrings and they can’t pull them off. I was lucky or smart when I challenged them. They gave in, and now I’m learning something of my own power.

I do get some mileage out of my title, I hate to admit it. When, I’m uncomfortable with somebody new and they ask me what my job is, I make a joke of telling them. But the fact is, I do tell them. It’s status, of course. When I’m free of the fear of losing it, I’ll be a much healthier person.

I’m called a patients’ representative. My job is to admit them into the hospital. I’m the first one they see when they walk in the door and the last one to see when they leave. When they get their bills in the mail, they think of me. I think my name is listed along with the fire and police department on their telephone. (Laughs.) Who to call in emergencies.