My job is stressing me out. It’s crunch time; only two more weeks left and the last week will be a 6 day camping trip. I’m cranky, I’m exhausted, and I’m not happy. I love my job, I just dislike the politics and drama. Planning events and recruiting volunteers is fun; I get paid to camp, how awesome is that? But there are people on my team who would like everything to be done their way, and that’s just not how a team works. There are people on my team who don’t listen to my opinions, my suggestions, my needs.

For instance, putting me on the wheelchair bus is a bad idea. I am physically unable to lift the wheelchair members without hurting myself or more importantly, them. If something bad happens during the seven hour long bus ride up to camp, I will not be of any help. I’m supposed to be the staff member on the bus. This does not make sense to me. I wouldn’t feel comfortable knowing my own physical limits.

I spoke to my boss, and he sees my point. Finally. I wouldn’t have gone to my boss had the person who made the bus assignments listened to me when I pointed that out. Instead, he argued with me saying nothing would happen and I would not have to lift a wheelchair member at all during the trip. However, he can’t grantee that, and technically the rule is when lifting someone in a wheelchair you must have a staff with you, so I couldn’t tell two volunteers to do it either. Because it isn’t safe. I know how to do wheelchair lifts, but I physically cannot. If someones safety wasn’t potentially at risk, I wouldn’t say a thing.

It’s irritating me how my medical disability is holding me back from so much. This is the field I wish to work in, yet I’m unable to do a wheelchair lift. I’m working on it, and training to do it in ways where I would not hurt myself at all. I’m not a very strong person, and my bones aren’t very strong either. I never understood that aspect about MHE; you have a lot of bones but their fragile, or at least mine are. That’s no fun. Where’s the use in that?

The important thing is that I am working on finding ways around my MHE. I now know my physical limits, and I won’t push myself to do something that could result in jeopardising the safety of someone else and myself. I’m not an idiot. I won’t allow that to happen. I’m not only speaking about the now, but also about in the future. I won’t do stupid things to satisfy co-workers. It just ain’t gonna happen. My word – when it comes to my physical limits and health – is law.

I wasn’t so smart before. I used to push myself to do things to satisfy other people. When I worked at Tim Hortons, I ended up hurting myself really badly several times trying to satisfy my bosses and co-workers. I couldn’t lift the cream bag to change it without hurting myself, but I knew my co-workers were sick of doing it for me. They didn’t know why they were doing it for me, they just thought I was lazy. So one day I did it myself. I ended up dropping it on the floor after hurting my wrist really badly. I also fractured my ankle at school. It was Track and Field day and the teachers were notified that I couldn’t participate in the event. They told me to volunteer at the Shot Put game and pick up the really heavy balls. I ended up fracturing my ankle in one of the holes that the really heavy ball left. All these things (and more) happened because I didn’t speak up.

So from now on I will.

My first ever Wilderness Weekend was this weekend. My head is still pounding. Needless to say, I am glad its over. It didn’t go bad presay, I mean for the members at least. They seemed to have fun, so did everyone else. It was me who didn’t have a lot of fun.

It wasn’t the sleeping on the ground, that wasn’t too bad actually. Dad picked me up a rather expensive self inflatable mattress that allowed me to get a couple hours of sleep. I was still pretty worn out though – its hard work. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be such long, difficult days. Feeding 30 people and making sure they are all happy is hard, especially when two board members are there judging us.

Also, other volunteers don’t listen to me. Nobody really does. I got a lot of questions as to why I’m a Summer Student. One of the volunteers (who happens to be dating one of my co-workers) even made a casual “joke” about the difference between “working and getting paid.” It seems like the entire weekend was a joke on my behalf. Jessica isn’t good at this, or she’s not doing that.

What really irritates me is the fact that we are understanding of our members needs and limits, but not volunteers. I was a volunteer, and I am now a staff. People still don’t understand that I have a medical condition that limits my mobility and affects my strength. It may appear that I am being lazy, but I’m not. I work as hard as my body will let me, and as much as I would hate to admit it, its not as hard as other people can work. I find people got annoyed with me because I couldn’t help load the van and I wasn’t much help with taking down the dining shelter. They should know. They should understand. But they don’t.

If you have MHE, then you know that if you have it “bad enough”, then working is hard. As I’ve previously mentioned, MHE affects your mobility and limits your strength, so working is difficult. I work at a place were I’m on my feet running around all day long. It’s recreational stuff, programming and what not. It’s hard, especially when you have volunteers who are lazy and don’t want to help out even though they can. It’s harder still when nobody listens to you because they don’t hold a lot of respect for you because they think you too are lazy and not working hard enough.

I don’t know how much longer I can take being dictated to and bossed around by people who are at the same level of position as I am. I don’t give a pooh about them “being there longer” or “being older” then I am. Sunrise is supposed to be a happy place where nobody judges. Volunteers do nothing but judge. Actually, so do most co-workers and board members.

Three more camping weekends, then one more week long camping trip.

I am really sorry for the lack of updates as of lately! I just get so busy during my day, and I have honestly not been home lately. I also have trouble finding specific things related to my disorder to talk about…considering my every day life isn’t wrapped around my medical condition. For the most part anyway, I try not to let it control my life and dictate what I can and can’t do – but sometimes it does and then I just have to ignore it!

So much as happened, and I have a lot of updates to share with everyone. I shall have to resort to using bullets!

• June 1st was my prom; I have to admit it wasn’t as fun as I was hoping it would be. My legs were killing me from a SYG dance the night before and from the new shoes I was wearing. I did look very nice, if I say so myself.
• After prom I went to my boyfriend’s trailer with him and his family for the weekend. It was lovely and the weather was beautiful; we went swimming several times. I had far more fun there then I would have had at the camping trip my peers put together. I actually like my boyfriend and his family, so that’s probably why.
• The end of May/early June was a stressful, scary time. My Papa went to Kingston General Hospital to have Triple Bypass Surgery. He’s home now, and my mom is currently helping my grandma out. Papa seems to be doing very well – thank God – and I hope to visit him soon!
• Tomorrow if I work 8 hours then I will have completed my required co-op hours to graduate. I will have 660.57 hours. I plan on going in half an hour early too, just to boost the number up.
• Because I am finishing co-op earlier then to be expected, my boss is allowing me to take Monday and Tuesday off to visit my Papa at his home. He would also allow me to take the Wednesday off, but I promised a co-worker I would help him run a Murder Mystery club night on Wednesday. Thursday I am back at work only I will be getting paid for it! Which is a good thing, considering Thursday I will be doing a lot of work; Friday head out to a provincial park to camp for the weekend with 14 of our recreational members. Its going to be hectic!
• Because of my medical condition, I am not joining the other Summer Students when they go up to camp a day early to set up. Setting up tents and dinner shelters is too much for my body, so someone else is going up instead. My job will be to stay at the building and collect medication, take attendance when people get on the bus, and basically be in charge of people for the hour long bus ride. I’m positive I can do it, but I’m slightly nervous. It’s a lot of responsibility – especially meds! If I mess up on forms for meds, I will most likely get fired. But no worries! I won’t mess up!
• My work is offering really interesting courses such as Behaviour Management and Non-Violent Crisis Intervention – free of charge or completely cheap! I attended the Behaviour Management class today and learned a lot about PDD and the particular behaviours and how to stop outbursts from happening, it was awesome!

All those little updates aside, I have something that is burning on my mind and will surely result in lots of posts on this here blog. I’m having a slight conflict with one of the people I work with. I’m trying not to let that cloud my opinion of them, but the amount of “evidence” that is piling up that they just don’t like me is impossible to ignore. Obviously, when you feel as if your co-worker(s) don’t like you, your performance goes down hill. I’m not sure why, but it does. I’m hoping it will blow over and things will change, but I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t let office issues cloud my working ability, so I’m going to try not to. But I have a feeling its going to be an interesting summer.

If you’ve ever experienced pushing your body to its limits and not getting anything good out of it, you’ll understand this post. Since February I’ve worked my bony bum off at my co-op, because I knew all along that I would be applying for summer student and I wanted them to see how hard of a worker I am. Not to mention, I needed every hour to count so I could graduate this year.

But my body is tired and it feels like I’ve proven nothing. Yes, they appreciate all that I’ve done. Yes, they appreciate the fact that I’m in here every day while the other co-op student calls in sick 99.9% of the time. But it still doesn’t seem to be enough, because Greg keeps talking about the really awesome nursing students they’ve interviewed. I can’t compare to a nursing student, I’m only in high school. All I have to offer is my goals for the future, my ability to work hard and stay on task, and the fact that I’ve been here forever and know the members. Plus that I’m self driven. I can complete tasks on my own or in a group. But I’m also just in high school. They already have a high school student, and they like him a lot because he knows what he’s doing and they don’t have to train him. They would have to train me.

One of the reasons why I really want this job is because I won’t have to stand for long periods of time. I’m already doing all of the work the summer students would be doing and my body – for the most part – is handling it well. I’m tired because I am pushing myself to come in everyday, but I need to break my body in and get used to coming to work everyday.

Hopefully all this hard work will pay off. I should know by Friday.

Yesterday I went to a Youth Fair with my co-op employer, Greg, to recruit volunteers for Sunrise. We set up our board and pamphlets and waited to talk to whoever came up interested. The kids were from grade 7 up to grade 11, and again I was wowed about how inconsiderate and rude peoples kids are. For instance, this guy in about grade 8 or maybe 9 came up to our table to ask what this “Sunrise” thing was about. Greg told him Sunrise was a recreational group for the developmentally handicapped and all we required our volunteers to do was to come out and be friends with our members and basically treat them the same as they would their friends. We explained that Sunrise was created to give developmentally handicapped adults the same opportunities as anyone else has.

This kid was being rude the entire time, rolling his eyes and waiting impatiently for us to finish just so he could say “why would we want to do that, its not like they’d know any differently!” in a rude tone. Greg and I were stunned. For starters, they do know when someone is treating them differently, and they don’t like it. They do deserve the same opportunities as any other person out there, and to come up to us and to fart stuff out of their butts about our members not deserving the same opportunities as anyone else.

But he just shook his head and laughed and said “I don’t need this shit.” It irritated me to no end because we didn’t force this kid to come over and we certainly didn’t want to hear his ridiculous opinion about stuff he doesn’t know. How come kids today are so stunned? I get that not everyone can work with developmentally handicapped people, but to be that rude about it? Why? Why act like you’re better then someone when you really aren’t?

I’ve noticed that there are a couple people out there who act like they are better then anyone who has a medical problem or delay. It’s pathetic, because no one is better then anyone else in this world. Unless that person is scum and goes around talking about how developmentally handicapped people shouldn’t have the same opportunities as “regular” people.