Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 February 2005 21:08:51
Cute moment at work today: I went to visit a 3 year old boy who has recently come into my caseload, rang the doorbell and there were all these yells of "Jack! Jack!" followed by lots of giggling. His foster mum (who had told him in advance that Jackie the health visitor was coming) opened the door looking completely mortified and embarrassed and said "I'm so sorry, he keeps calling you Jack, he thinks it's really funny". So I just smiled sweetly and said "Don't worry, I'm kinda used to it".
I think I'm going to like this kid. At one point I told him I was going to come back another day as I needed to test his eyes, and in all seriousness he went all wide-eyed and said "What? all of them?"
Sadly though those cute and rewarding moments are few and far between at the moment. I love my job, I love health visiting, but it's just relentless at the moment, and we are getting very little support from our managers. Every time we have a good idea or the chance to get involved in public health initiatives we're actively discouraged - there's all this talk about supporting staff to increase their skills and experience, but the reality is very very different. Even if I don't get onto the PhD course, I've definitely decided to move this year - in other parts of the country there's some really innovative health visiting work going on which would be great to get involved in, but we're too busy putting out fires in our oversized caseload and getting deflated by managers who don't understand our job to get involved in anything else.
Changing the subject completely, as well as giving up stuff for Lent I've also tried to be more disciplined as regards daily Bible reading. Over the last year or so I've started using a new translation and have found that a lot of the familiar passages that I would usually just skim as I knew them so well suddenly seem to contain totally new stuff that I'd not noticed before. A couple of days back I was reading I Samuel 3, and I noticed for the first time a phrase which really struck me: "As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground" (I Sam 3:19). One of my biggest pet hates is litter and this image really reminded me of that as I thought about my own words - how many of them are worth much at all, and how many of them fall to the ground as no good to anyone? It's made me resolve to be more careful with my words - if I'm just going to talk rubbish then I'm better off staying silent. I want to increase the percentage of my words that bring good. I guess I'd better start looking at my heart while I'm at it (eek).