Day in the Life
I think there’s hope for my knee! I was very skeptical that physical therapy could do anything for my knee. How can you fix a piece of bone sticking out? Obviously I am not a health care professional, so my theories were not based on reality.
I had the first appointment yesterday. I was scared when I first walked in because the place seemed kind of dingy and the therapists looked kind of creepy, but once I met the actual therapist (I think the other people were her assistants) things went much better. She had me cornered off behind a curtain and did an extremely thorough exam of my knees and hips. I am knock-kneed, pronate, have one hip higher than the other and walk on the edges of my feet. On the plus side, I am really strong and do not have any muscle degradation. She strongly suggested I go to a podiatrist ASAP and get inserts for my shoes to fix my back problem.
She gave my knee a deep massage, wrapped it in heating pads and gave it shock therapy, then put some swooping pieces of tape around the knee cap (the kids are really impressed with the bright pink design). And it feels quite a bit better! No where near 100%, but there was definitely a noticeable difference. I have seven more sessions over the next month, so I have some real hope that I will not have to live with this pain forever.
The kids had swimming lessons yesterday and it was so annoying. The swim school runs on six week sessions so you are only with the same group of people for six weeks. I am constantly switching around our days to accommodate other things, so I never know who I’ll be stuck in the waiting room with. There’s always some interesting people, but in general it’s fine. I sit and read or play Candy Crush or walk across the street to the only grocery store in our county that’s allowed to sell alcohol and buy little bottles of wine (for later, not to drink while I’m watching the kids swim).
This session? Hooo-boy! There’s a couple of wack-a-doos!
The first lady is just super entitled. She was bitching to her friend that she went to a high school sports event and she didn’t have any money, but since she goes every week she thought the lady taking tickets would let her in without paying. She was beyond irate that the ticket lady wouldn’t let her in without paying and couldn’t believe the nerve of “that bitch.” I’m sitting there thinking “wut?” Is she really trying to make everyone in the whole waiting room think she’s the innocent party here? You don’t have the cash to get in, you don’t go! How is this the ticket lady’s fault? I felt so bad for the ticket lady. It sounded like the non-payer made quite a scene at the school.
There’s another lady who is completely neurotic. Our swim school has regular classes, private classes and semi-private lessons (you split the cost of lessons with someone else). The neurotic woman’s child is doing semi-private lessons with another little girl. From what I understand they were not friends before they started doing lessons–they just signed up on the semi-private match system and were assigned together, but they like each other and the neurotic lady only wants her child to have lessons with the little girl they were matched with. The other mom seems friendly to the neurotic lady, but I wonder if she is regretting teaming up with this lady.
The first week, the other mom told the neurotic mom that she was going to have to change days in future lessons because some other activity was starting up in March. The lady FREAKED. “I need to process this, I need to process this. I don’t do well with change. I can’t do any other day because this is the day we do swimming.” The other mom calmly stated, “Well, it is nice to have them together but if you need to stick with this day that’s fine. We can sign up to find new semi-private partners.”
This caused a shit storm, because the lady doesn’t deal well with change. I don’t really know what happened because the neurotic mom got up and went outside. She was pacing back and forth and looked like a crazy person.
Then yesterday the teacher was out, so the manager took over that particular class. She is a really sweet girl and everything looked like it was going ok. Neurotic Mom’s child started to cry and the manager was trying to handle it, but neurotic mom busted into the pool (no parents are supposed to go in there, though I admit I have gone in a a couple of times to calm Elsa down) to solve the problem. She was screaming and shaking and scaring her kid even more. The teacher explained what they were doing and said the child had done it once but didn’t want to do it again. I don’t know. . .she was calm and reassuring and kind.
The mom FREAKED. The teacher got the little boy back in the pool and he was totally fine, but the mom was in the waiting room yelling about the teacher being so nasty to her and her son and all these horrible things. Then it looked like she was having some kind of panic attack or something. I was seriously sitting there thinking I needed to call 911 to have someone give her a shot of sedative. It was nuts. Her son was in the pool, smiling and laughing and she was in the waiting room having a complete meltdown.
She finally went outside and asked the other mom to watch her kid. I really wanted to ask the other mom her thoughts on the crazy, but figured that would be a bad idea.
Then, directly after swimming, we went to our school fundraiser night at Chuck E. Cheese. There were a total of three families from our school. What a wasted opportunity to bring in some money (the lady in charge didn’t send out flyers).
I think the Read-A-Thon is going to be a giant fail. I picked up the first set of reading logs yesterday (we are reading for three weeks and turning in sheets every Thursday so we can announce totals at the Monday meeting). We had thirty sheets. Thirty. Out of five hundred students. My only hope is that the teachers just hadn’t had a chance to bring them down to the work room yet. I’ll go in today to see if we have any more, but at this point I want to cry. I’ve never had anything I’ve touched be such an utter failure before.