OMG! I was told I have bad Service Coordinator karma today. We had Maria’s annual review with the state. The coordinator was there with me, nanny Sue, and a rep from the agency that provides Maria’s habilitation (which Sue does; habilitation is where she’s teaching Maria to do tasks for life skills, like holding a spoon). Maria came home from school (asleep) an hour into the meeting and the physical therapist came for her weekly visit 30 min later. The woman from the state was trying to be nice, I suppose, but she kind of has a bit of attitude, kept cutting me off, kept contradicting what she’d just said the previous minute, oh yea, and did I mention she kept interrupting me? Once when she interrupted, I said, “wait, listen to me!” or “let me finish!” or some such command. (which shockingly stopped her).
The one that really ticked me off was when she asked me if we had a plan in place at school for if/when Maria had seizures. I pulled out the document I’d given the school and started to read it and she interrupted me and started talking about something else! Wow!
We’d been discussing at length the need for 2 hrs of physical therapy per week. I was trying to explain the hippotherapy in the winter, intensive PT to work on walking in the summer, kept reading from Barb’s latest report about how many sessions we had this past summer and the wonderful results we got. At the end of the report, Barb wrote that she recommends 1 hr of PT/week, so the coordinator was telling me what she needed Barb to do to support the 2 hrs/week. When Barb walked in, they’d never met, but the coordinator just jumped on her and told her she wanted her to change her previous 4 reports to say she recommended 2 hrs/wk. Barb was caught cold so she disagreed, which caused the coordinator to accuse me of asking for something the PT wasn’t recommending. I’m sure this makes no sense, but that’s about how the meeting went. I thought we were on the same page on something and then zing, off it went.
At one point the woman from the state actually said, outloud, in front of all of us, that she now understood why the last coordinator had such a hard time with us. I could not believe she said that and wish I would have said, “EXCUSE ME?!”
Poor Maria doesn’t like conflict. She wasn’t as upset as when the last coordinator was there, but she was definitely out of sorts.
When she left, all of us just looked at each other and said, wow! Bad coordinator karma. I definitely need some advice on how to deal with people like that. 3 more weeks until Manolis comes home! sorry, no re-reading and editing of this post. The Mama just needs a rant entry every so often…..