Man, what a month. Six weeks, actually.
Tim is home, for good, but we had him discharged from his RTC so fast that we didn’t have time to make any transition plans for school / doctors / therapy that weren’t part of the RTC. I really wouldn’t recommend doing it that way. We had a good reason. Without getting into all the hairy details, a few incidents happened that proved that the RTC couldn’t keep Tim safe and we absolutely would not let him stay there one second longer. They tried to talk us into keeping him there, but there was no freaking way that was going to happen. I insisted they call the local police to have an investigation done. I can’t believe DCFS hasn’t investigated (or maybe they have and I’m just not aware of it). In any case, it is clear they don’t have near enough safeguards on clients that are over 18. Just because Tim is 18 doesn’t mean he is as mature as an 18 year old. He’s about as mature as a 10 year old. They knew that. They just don’t have to put as much effort into safeguarding him from other clients over 18 that are more mature because they are all over 18. And that pisses me off, to a large extent. My kid paid the price for me assuming they would do the right thing, simply because they did when he was under 18. What the hell is so magical about turning 18?
In the past six weeks we’ve:
- Had the basement flood
- Begged and pleaded for an IEP meeting for a new placement
- Visited the day placement the school recommends (and we approved today)
- Made an appointment for a new pdoc (first appointment is this week)
- Begged the pdoc from the RTC for enough med scripts to hold us over until we could get an appointment with a new pdoc
- Had an interview with the guy who runs the in-home mentoring program Tim qualifies for
- Set goals for in-home mentoring
- Made calls to see when we could get in-home mentoring to start
- Run through 3,000,000,000 gallons of gas in the riding lawn mower, as Tim “helps out” by driving laps around the house, by driving his siblings in the trailer behind the riding lawn mower around the neighborhood, and by generally impersonating Alvin Straight
- Filled out a ton of paperwork for our regional special recreation district summer session
- Gotten Tim on Facebook (don’t say you weren’t warned)
- Spent “quality time” at the Social Security Administration office
- Had the first court date to get plenary guardianship of Tim
- Gotten Tim a bank account
- Made 436,327 follow up calls
- Raised $3,115 in sponsorships for NAMIWalks Milwaukee and BringChange2Mind
