The Days Go By

Four weeks of term have passed, and Julie is still coping, more or less.  She goes into the school most days, even if for only an hour, and one day a week she stays for several hours.  Most of the time she has one-to-one lessons or studies independently; occasionally she attends a class, though she often leaves before the end.  She still spends one and a half days a week at the hospital, where she is still having CAT sessions.

At the beginning I baulked at the sheer number of different non-school people assigned to work with Julie, but in practice it has all been necessary.  Each agency can only spare a few hours here and there, so the week has been stitched together out of a patchwork of different support workers, and the occasional islands of school.  Each of the support workers brings different strengths: one is young and makes Julie laugh, one is older and wiser and comes armed with practical suggestions, another has lots of contacts at the school and knows how to "work the system" to get the best out of it.  Coordinating all of these people is a nightmare, but as each week passes and people settle down into more predictable patterns, it becomes a little easier. 

Inevitably, there is never quite enough support to allow me to return to working in the office - there are too many gaps when Julie needs to be supervised, or to be ferried somewhere (usually school, sometimes hospital).  For the moment I am forced to remain a reluctant home worker, but as long as there are no emergencies, I can work at home reasonably effectively.  Emergencies, of course, are another matter.

Julie is considering her options for next year, after she has finished her GCSE courses.  There are lots of options for sixth form study, and we look through armfuls of glossy prospectuses for all the different colleges in the neighbourhood.  The only questions we really want to ask are ones not addressed by brochures - how will these colleges look at Julie's extraordinary record of non-attendance, her fistful of remaining GCSEs, and what may probably be indifferent grades?  The things that make so many of these colleges attractive to everyone else - the academic success, the extra-curricular activities, the vibrant social life - are the very things that deter Julie from applying to them.  We just want to know what they can do to support her to get some sort of further education.  She is still not allowed to be on her own in her current school, unsupervised by an adult.  Much may change in the next year, but there may be more crises to come.

Days come and go, some better, some worse than others.  Bad days are often bad from the moment Julie wakes up.  We battle our way through them and are immensely grateful if a friend or one of our support workers has arranged to come, relying on them to help rally us.  It makes us feel less alone when someone comes to help.  It is awful to be alone with mental illness, awful to try first one thing then another and have nothing work.  Last winter when we were alone was awful. I am so grateful to have so much help this year.