Thursday, September 28, 2006

On our second day to the apartment we tried to work a little bit on Brigance (by the way, Brigance is a developmental test we do at the beginning and the end of the internship to see what the kids need to work on and how they have improved). It was a little bit frustrating because we started on Mihai and Shannon is really really partial to Mihai. It was a problem for me because I felt like she always wanted to say he could do things and wasn’t realizing that it actually helps Mihai more if we mark down things he can’t do because then we’ll know to work on those things and otherwise we won’t. It seems like you’re being nice to him to “give it to him” and say he can do it, but it’s really not. Anyway, so we got a little frustrated with each other and by the time the day was over I wasn’t really too keen on talking to her. We went straight to the hospital from Dancu and I stopped in at a store and grabbed a banana because I figured I’d get hungry. Also, we had to figure out how to get to the hospital from the tram stop we knew we were supposed to get off on. Shannon said Holly had said you had to go down this alleyway, so we walk into this alleyway on the side of this other hospital and there was a dog in the middle of the path. Well, we didn’t think much of it because there are always dogs everywhere, but the dog started barking ferociously at us and bolted for Shannon. At first she tried to run, but then she realized that was not a good idea and didn’t want to encourage it, so she stopped, but then she didn’t know what to do, so she was standing there with the dog coming at her looking really freaked out and she was like, “now what do I do???” I remembered all the things I’ve always heard about coyotes and bobcats and all that, so I said (literally, out loud and everything) “you do this!” and I whipped around, threw my arms up and went “Ahhh!” and just yelled really loud at him and tried to be as scary as little old me could be. It worked somehow and the dog just stopped and we walked away really quickly, Awkward (because there were people pretty close by) and scary. Luckily we ended up finding the right alleyway pretty quickly. At the hospital, I think maybe I started off with Maria and then went down to Iulia. I remember when I was in with Iulia, she looked really really bad at first and it just like made my heart skip. I don’t remember for sure, but I think it was Marina that was in there to begin with, and I think Holly came in at some point as well (although this could have been another day). At any rate, I think this may have been how it happened (I could be mixing two days into one, but all of these things happened). Marina and I were singing to her and trying to get her to sleep, but she was really really sweaty. Like, I remember when I first came in she looked like she was just doing horrible to me. She was completely red and had beads of sweat all over her face. Marina said she’d just wiped the sweat of her face like a couple minutes before too and that it just kept coming back. Well, I wiped the sweat off of her again and then we started singing hymns to her. We just started from the beginning of the hymn book and she was starting to get sleepy, but would wake up whenever we paused, so we’d have the next song prepared ahead of time so we wouldn’t even skip a beat. Well, right as we thought we were kind of getting her to sleep, the doctors and nurses swarmed in and started working on her. At first I was a little frustrated because she wasn’t even close to sleep then, but by the end I was really grateful for them. It was really hard to watch because they always use a pipe to clean out her nose, mouth and throat hole, which she always hates and cries through. Also, because they turned her on the other side and I saw that she had a really huge, nasty and gross bedsore on the side of her head that they dressed with gauze and antibiotic cream. They also changed her diaper and her clothes. So by the end I just felt so much better because she was all clean and changed and her wound was dressed and because they cleaned out all her sinuses and she wasn’t hot and sweaty any more and was much much happier. Anyway, after they left I think that’s when Holly came in and she was really tired, so instead of singing Iulia to sleep, we ended up actually singing Holly to sleep. Come to think of it, I think sometime during this day I also went to try to find kids on the first floor. Actually, I think I specifically tried to find Constantine or Radu, but the nurses kept directing me to other babies, so I ended up spending some time with Octavion, who I actually thought was some other baby because he looks so different from when I saw him before. After the hospital, we had Outreach, so Shannon and I went to outreach together. On the way there she brought up how we were mad at each other earlier and we had a good, productive discussion about it and tried to figure out what to do in the future. It still took me a second to be completely over it afterward, but it made it so I could heal and get over it, so it was really good. During outreach I just played uno and talked to people, and then I went home!