Sleepless in L.A.

I keep having nights of bad rest, and it's really cramping my style. Like this past week, I woke up at 4:30 A.M. one day after going to bed at midnight, and then I woke up at 5:30 this morning. The thing that sucks is that I won't feel sleepy until half an hour before my alarm is supposed to go off. (I totally have the image of Andy in "40-year-old Virgin, when he's wide awake all the way to the time his alarm goes off and he says, "this is going to be a bad day."). Hopefully, it's just the first-month-back-at-work adjustment that is the cause. It most likely is b/c once I wake up and can't fall asleep, my mind immediately starts racing and trying to problem-solve how to work with my kids.

A lot of times, I think about my most challenging kid. He has severe autism and is showing new behavioral problems, which many speculate is due to him not having taken to an effective communication system. With him being nonverbal, the pressure is really on me to make some miracles happen. At the end of the summer, the parents requested an emergency-IEP. After the meeting, I got an e-mail that said parents want to up his services from 2x/week individual...to 5x/week individual! I half-joked that either they think I'm not working hard enough or they think I'm a miracle-worker. The more I think about it, the more I think it's the latter only b/c it's been a while since an SLP was willing to work with him. Last year, I took him off of consultative basis to work with him directly b/c 1) I was the gung-ho SLP who just graduated and 2) deep down I believe that as SLPs, we don't give up on nonverbal kiddos, especially if it's b/c we as the specialists in communication disorders lack the knowledge. Sadly, I'm getting the impression that this is the case with some/most SLPs who have been in this field for many years.

On the other hand, that makes me put a lot of pressure on myself to perform some miracle. Well, I've worked a whole year with him and no miracles have happened.

What I often forget, and my BCBA supervisor compassionately reminds me, is that this teenager has gone through 10+ years of speech therapy...and I cannot expect myself to be the one to perform miracles (and from an ABA-perspective, it would be quite difficult since this child has had 10+ years of reinforcement history communicating in less functional ways). The "typical problem-solving" male that my supervisor is simply told me, "Don't think that you've failed if you haven't gotten him to functionally communicate. You've set your expectations of yourself so high that if you 'fail,' you have only failed yourself. This child has had so many years of therapy and if he is still like this, you are just one more person who didn't meet the challenge. Now if you do meet the challenge, then you'll be a hero. But remember, you didn't fail if you couldn't."

I know this year will be different since I have new staffmembers who are readily available to assist. I just hope that I approach this challenge with the right mind set, knowledge, and experience.

And I hope that I get a good night's rest.