PSW’s & Nobu
A friend of mine, someone I had met in a local pub approximately 18 years ago… Jackie, she goes by Jax. She’s one of the few people that stick out. She came to visit me in the hospital after things had died down and with all things a “Grandmother Love’s You” sandwich in hand. A fucking sandwich that I had been trying to get my hands on for the longest time and now of course, I had no fucking appetite. Jax and I had this foodie thing going on throughout the pandemic. A reciprocating food pic relationship and being the huge dog lover that she is, she offered to walk my dog Nobu, whenever. I actually very briefly let her in. Jax never asked, she just did and that's exactly what I needed while in that state of mind. She came to my house to walk Nobu, it was either the first or second day or so when I got home, actually, I think it was the same day I got home. Those days for me are still fuzzy. This bitch is holding down two jobs, crazy hours, has her own dog and still made time for me! Jax is one of those people I now reflect on and think to myself… wow! The people I thought who would be there for me were not, instead I was surprised at who actually showed up for me during this nightmare I was going through!
A nurse came to my home every other day to check on me and to clean and dress my wound for the next 2-3 weeks. They also had a PSW available to me twice a week but right away I was bathing by myself. First with the commode in the hospital and when I got home the medical supply company had sent me a shit load of medical supplies for my wound and a stool like a small bench for my bathtub. My little bath buddy! I actually really liked that little buddy, it came in handy and I was sad to have to part with it. I didn’t need a personal support worker washing my ass nor did I want one touching me, not at all! Not once did I have to be bathed by a nurse or even assisted while in the hospital so I definitely wasn’t letting it happen with a PSW at home!
I was up and about, kinda hype! I wasn’t able to sit still or chill.
Seriously though, this is how I had to keep it for a couple of weeks when I got home because of the boob sweat and the infected wound situation. I was obsessed with keeping that area clean and dry at all times.
I needed the part at the top of my wound, the part that kept ripping open to fucking heal!
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I did allow this one PSW to come in one time because I had a follow up person call me every other day or every three days. She was a social worker or a patient attendant of some sort, from the hospital. I don’t really remember her too well, just her friendly voice and the calls, they lasted months. She would call to check in on me, my mental state, my wound and my weight as I had to weigh myself every morning. This weighing myself every day business started while in the hospital the next day after surgery. I’d wake up early, dose, play with breakfast and hop on the scale. This routine continued when I got home. I didn’t have a scale, why the fuck would I have a scale? I’m a “if the clothes fit, I’m good kind of girl.” I never weighed myself, zero interest. But of course, Trent had a scale, a top of the line scale at that! The woman, patient attendant calling me, was also pushing the PSW’s on me and there were different random PSW’s that kept calling me wanting to come over and I was saying “no thanks, I’m good” but they were persistent, it was fucking annoying! It was approximately 3-4 days after Trent had left that I had let one in. All I wanted was someone to clean for me, my bathroom maybe a few dishes and she wasn’t about it, it wasn’t part of her job description. I didn’t want her touching me, I didn’t want her company, I didn’t even really want her in my house but I let her in, this one time and I asked her if she could please change my shower liner for me. She did and broke two shower hooks! Buh bye.. no more PSW headache bullshit for me thanks! And that was it, the first and the last. I cut that shit off completely or I thought I did! I told the patient attendant who was calling me to cancel that shit! I told her that it was more stress than help and that I didn’t want them calling me anymore. Still a week or so later, one showed up at my door! I buzzed her in, I had no clue who it was, I was in La La Land, in another world. I opened the door and she was pushy, pushing to come in. I’m like, sorry there must be a misunderstanding, no more PSW services for me, sorry. But she wasn’t leaving, she just stood there looking at me with her face saying “please let me in so I can get paid” I’m like “sorry byeee” and closed the door! Like what the fuck?! Why should anyone, alone and in the state I was in have to deal with that?!
I’m gonna expand on the PSW situation for me. They are like social workers. They have a very sensitive, caring position in the world and in the lives of others, their clients and 90% of them could give two fucks about you or what you need. The industry is hugely oversaturated and that’s because the government doesn’t want to pay nurse and therapist wages for people to do these jobs. So they use” PSW’s” and “Social Worker’s” to do those jobs that pay less and actually require more skill and knowledge than these people are acquiring throughout their “courses".”
Finding a PSW or a social worker that cares and does their job because they want to actually help people, is a fucking rarity! I’ve dealt with social workers all my life! I’ve sat one on on one with plenty of social workers, more than I can count and enough to know that the majority of the people that are in that industry, are there for the money. It’s a “job!” They do the bare minimum and sometimes, most times, it’s like pulling teeth just to get them to do that, basic shit! They do not care, they don’t wanna hear you out or do their required duties that are in their fucking job description!
Navigating through the system is a fucking skill, believe it! I was on the street and in the projects downtown, on my own at 14, I caught on quick, real fucking quick! I’ve got mad skills and I know a shit ton of people from allll walks of life and in allll different types of positions, from the West Coast all the way over to the East!
It takes a special kind of person to do these jobs properly, with the care and kindness that’s required to do a good job and most of them do more damage than they do good and it’s a crying fucking shame!
There’s 1,000,000 cold hearted social workers out there, pretending to be therapists without a PHD, they are not licensed therapists. Then you’ve got 1,000,000 maids out there, that don’t want to clean peoples toilets for minimum wage anymore so they take a 6 week course and are now a PSW! Personal “Support” Worker! Pretending to be all caring and nursey and because they were able to take a government funded “6 week” course and have slightly shifted gears, they are now “qualified” to wipe your ass, to bathe you?! Ya,I don’t think so!
I took a course after Trent was born to learn computers and to learn how to do a proper résumé, basically prepping to get back into the work world, a legit work world, a whole new world for me! I wanted to get a real job, a proper job for once in my life. Oh I’ve had jobs, hundreds! I shit you not! You name it, I fuckin’ did it!! I had Trent now, 2 kids, a baby and a 12 year old, solo. I wanted a job with benefits and proper wages, one I could be proud of, one my daughter could be proud of. I was 30 and after 15 years of hustling, I was going legit. I put the hustle down. Trent was here and he was leading me down a clean path. I was saying buh-bye to the risque lifestyle that didn’t always align with the law once and for all!
Somehow by the grace of God, I had made it this far in life without going to prison and I was counting my blessings! I was blessed to have made it out of all the shit I’ve been through in one piece!
This course was funded by the government and the majority of the people in that course that I met, were awful people, horrible and their career of choice was to become a PSW! This was 2003, that’s when that position started popping. They were just like dandelions, popping up everywhere!
The word, “support,” that is in the title of these positions, rarely exists. You have to fight to get them to do their job and if you do get someone who actually cares and does their job and doesn’t toss your request in the “forget about it” bin or pass it off to someone else and it sits in their “forget about it” bin, which then forces you to stress out by calling back 100 times to have to explain your situation over and over, again and again to multiple different worker’s for some basic shit…well you count your lucky fucking stars!
That’s the plan, to wear you out, to make you give up, to make you go through all the fucking hoops, in the hopes that you won’t call back or do the shit their sending you in circles to do and that you‘ll just throw in the towel. Well, like everybody else, when it comes to me… they have no fucking clue who they are dealing with! They don’t know about me! I go through hoops, I don’t go away and I don’t stop, I go hard! I ask a lot of questions, the right questions. I probe and if I don’t get results, the type of cooperation I should be receiving, then I have no quams taking it to the next level and I am fucking quick with it!
They don’t see me coming…I get shit done and nowadays, that's how hard you have to fucking go to get basic shit done! It’s fucking sad, because a lot of people don’t have that “fight” in them and they do toss in the towel, and those shit workers get away with it, until they come across someone like me. I know your “job description” well! Do your fucking job!
Housing, Daycare Subsidy, Ontario Works, all of it! I had to fight tooth and fucking nail to get! And the shit was designed for my fucking demographic! A mother with 2 kids on her own and my eldest with IBD for fucks sake! I refuse to use the term “single mother” and I never do because people who have kids on their own love tossing that term around like they’re crippled or something, I can’t stand it! Every course I ever took, people’s intro’s were just that…”Hi, I’m Fran and I’m a single mother.” So?! Y’all knew your baby was coming, you knew what it was! I knew I was going to raise both of my kids solo, I chose that! It didn’t make me disabled, if anything it made me go fucking harder! I am a mother with 2 kids, plain and simple.
I’ve been through the mill with social workers since I was 14 years old, and throughout my entire life, I have came across two maybe three that were actually helpful! As for the rest of them it was a constant uphill battle, a stressful fight just to get them to do their actual fucking job that they are paid, trained and hired to do. I speak the truth!
Nobu was already weird when I got home, he wouldn’t go near me. He clearly sensed something was off, haha ya me! We have a pretty big yard which he used to relieve himself in here and there, I guess I thought that would be fine for a short time expecting to be able to walk him myself sooner than later because well, at the time I thought I was just fine. I was carrying on like nothing happened! Meanwhile, I just had my chest cracked open like a fucking walnut!
When Trent left, every night for the first three days, Nobu pissed and shit diarrhea in the same area on my living room carpet! 3 nights in a fucking row! Fuck my life!!! And every morning, I would be down on my hands and knees with pine sol paper towels, towels and a bucket of hot water scrubbing and rinsing it out! Needless to say, this wasn’t helping my wound heal at all instead it just kept ripping more open making the healing process even longer. After the third episode, I was fucking done! Trent was gone and I was alone. I never called on anyone for help and for multiple reasons…Firstly, I didn’t want to put anyone out! It’s obviously a time sensitive situation and who the fuck is going to say “ya, sure Jaye, on my way to scrub shit!?” Secondly, asking for help and then being rejected would have just pissed me off even more. I had been rejected by my father multiple times over the years and throughout my entire life. By the time I was 20 I had enough rejection and abandonment issues to last me a lifetime and that right there played a huge role in my life, as to why I don’t ever ask for help, why I do shit by myself and why I carried myself the way that I did. That right there is the type of shit you don’t think is affecting you, but it is. The shit that creeps up on ya! You stuff the hurt and the pain down as far as you can and you try your best to pretend it’s not a part of you, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It festers, it waits until you stuff so much shit down, the bin can’t hold any more, the bin being your head and eventually it explodes! If someone’s got an item or two in their bin, they may be able to suppress that shit for life and good on them! I didn’t have an item or two in my bin, my bin started piling up at the age of 7. I had a big ass dirty ol’ bin and my bin was filled to the fucking brim!
Thirdly, I was also ashamed of the state I was in! I didn’t want anyone around me, observing me like that. And lastly by this time, 7-8 days home, nobody was really checking in on me anyway.
That was the beginning of what was a very lonely, dark, time for me. I had fully entered into a state of delirium.
However, while fucked up and in that state, I managed to jump on the Rover app and set up a dog walker for Nobu. Why didn’t I have this organized ahead of time? I don’t know, no fucking clue too much all at once I guess, but when I wanted the key back from my daughter I do remember that being partially why. She had the spare key to walk Nobu here and there should the odd occasion arise when Trent and I were out of town, but it was obvious that she was not going to be around for my recovery or for Nobu walks so I don’t know, that one slipped through the cracks! Anyway, I got Sonia from Rover onboard! She was a godsend, she walked Nobu every night for an hour for the next four weeks. No more episodes. He had adjusted to who or what I was now. Nobu was sorted. I actually felt bad for him because he obviously knew I wasn’t right and as a result he wasn’t himself for a while either.
After Nobu had been shitting and pissing on my carpet for the last three nights, I was tormented by it, mentally, grossed out! The carpet had to go! 23 days out of surgery…I started redecorating my apartment!
