Keeping a Balance

As predicted, we have had a roller-coaster of a week, with Julie just about making it through another full week of schooling.  There have been moments, I have to admit, when it has been touch and go.  There have been words spoken in anger, by various people at various points.  It has been harder to feel positive things like pride and inspiration because you do get tired, and the bad moments do sometimes feel as if they blot out the good.  But at the end of the day, what Julie has achieved still stands: she is still going to school, she is still fighting.

I had a social worker round to visit last week. Families like ours are not quite sure what to make of social workers, and they don't seem to know what to make of us. Like the social worker before her, she kept commenting on how nice the house was.  It was a tip: I had had several nights of bad sleep, so there were dirty pans in the sink, and in any case, no amount of sleep will get me to tackle the mountains of junk on the dining-room table.  But I guess social workers do see a disproportionate number of houses that are more than just a little bit untidy, and it was nice for once to see it through her eyes and see that it was quite a nice place to bring up children.  Since it was our first meeting (probably of several) she had to think about our house, and she had to ask about our story from the beginning.  I tried to keep it short, and summarize, but I'm afraid she missed the bus back because she asked too many questions and there was an awful lot to tell!

The plan is that once Julie is discharged from the hospital, social services will step in and fill some of the gap in support.  Obviously some of the support has to be medical, but the medical services stop short: way too short, some people would say.  One of the problems of mental illness for teenagers is that it trashes a critical part of your development: it barges right through the key years of your education, and right through the years when you should be working out your social identity, smoking your first cigarette behind the bikesheds, and kissing your first boyfriend.  At the moment, Julie is rarely without a supervising adult, and cannot take a bus on her own, severely restricting her social life. Medical services have done some things for her - her occupational therapist has been working on bus trips, for example - but they cannot tackle the wider aspects of social loss.  I very much doubt that social services can do much either, but we might as well try.  There is so little money available, that the best we can hope for is to piggyback on something they happen to be offering anyway.  At the end of the day, we will just have to muddle through.  No doubt Julie will have an interesting story to tell by the end of her life!