BINGO!

As I said at the end of my last post, I had my second exam on Monday. I really didn't study at all the entire weekend before the exam because I went home on Wednesday because I didn't have clinical. So I was freaking out, and only studied the day of the exam for about 5 hours with some friends from my class. As it turns out, the multiple choice Gods were on my side on Monday because I ended up getting a 94%. Awesome. That totally made my day. Even though I was "that guy" that everyone hated because I did that well without studying...

Tuesday I had my second LEI visit with my elderly client, which went well. Then I had theory and we talked about mood disorders like depression, bipolar, and suicide. It was pretty interesting since a lot of the residents at Ferguson have these issues.

As usual, the most exciting part of my week is clinical, which was Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday was fairly uneventful. We hadn't been there the week before, some of the residents were really excited to see us and were eager to hang out. Another student and I walked with one of the residents to get coffee in the morning, then came back and played cards and hung out. In the afternoon I went for another walk with a resident to the grocery store. At the end of the day I worked at the "Lucky Bucks" store in the apartment building. This store has necessities like toilet paper, paper towel, soap, shampoo, combs, razors, towels, sheets, etc. The residents earn "lucky bucks" by having good room inspections, helping with chores, volunteering with projects, etc. They can then use this money to buy the things that they need. It was very interesting to see how excited the residents are to get into the store and see if there are any new things (sometimes they get things donated), and how happy they are to just get the necessities that they need.

Thursday was a really fun day. In the morning I learned how to play dominoes, which is surprisingly harder than I had previously thought. The guys that were teaching us were SUPER into dominoes and were really funny about teaching us. It was a lot of fun learning though, and by the end I was beating all of them :) It's hard to win sometimes though because some of the residents take these games very seriously and don't take it well when they lose. We also played BINGO on Thursday with the residents, which was also an experience. We had probably 15 or 20 residents that came to play, so we were happy about that. A few of the girls had gone out that morning to buy BINGO prizes for the games. They bought things like gloves, hats, toilet paper, soap, deodorant, body wash and more. So then we started playing BINGO, and with each person that won, there were 10 other people that got upset about it. We heard every reason under the sun that they were losing. We were rigging the game, we wanted them to lose, we were playing favorites, the balls weren't mixed up, people were cheating, they had unlucky cards... you get the point. Paranoid schizophrenics are not the greatest BINGO players, but they all still enjoyed it and had a good time. We all had a good time also, and it made the day go by really quickly. All in all a pretty good week! Just busy since this week I also babysat 4 days and worked at the Children's Center! Looking forward to the weekend! :)