Overnights

 This job is so interesting. It’s a group home for people with intellectual disabilities. The ladies in the one I work at are sort of elderly (but not that old). They are all older than me, and so are the three other staff members. 

The house supervisor, let’s call her drunk text boss. (See below). I went from gift card boss in Houston to drunk text boss haha. She takes the job very seriously. I noticed that in the beginning, she was calling the residents of the group home “the girls”. I decided on my own not to do that. I call them “the ladies”. Girls are children, to me anyway. I didn’t tell drunk text boss that I felt that way, I just started doing it. The past couple days, she’s called them “the ladies” around me too. I guess she “caught on” and “figured” that I thought girls meant children. I don’t mind what she does either way. But it was nice to see her adapt to my lingo like that. She works 8-4. The 4-midnight shift and the other overnights that I’m off are alternated between two other staff ladies that have been there decades. 

My schedule is as follows: Saturday evening to Sunday morning 8pm-8am. Sunday evening to Monday morning 8pm to 8 am. Tuesday morning midnight to 8, and Friday morning midnight to 8 (driving to work at 11pm Monday evening and Thursday evening.)

Some group homes do 8 or 12 hour shifts, and some do live in shifts, where staff members stay 2-5 days at a time and sleep on the job. This group home has a staff bedroom, and they did it like this until honestly just a couple months ago. The other two staff ladies that have been there decades aren’t used to it at all. They were getting overtime to sleep on the job, pretty much. I would have liked that arrangement too. But this new company took over a couple months ago, and they aren’t allowing staff to sleep on the clock. That also means that you can’t work the ENTIRE weekend from Friday till Monday or whatever else for several days. This company is only allowing us to work 16 hours at a time max, if that. I don’t blame them, I would run it the same way if possible. However, if the clients who live in the group home do not need constant care and sleep well through the night, then sleeping staff might make sense, especially if they get paid less on the graveyard shift. 

We have to prove that we aren’t sleeping on the job by logging into the desk computer in the office and doing bed checks every hour. When I went to training, bed checks consisted of basically looking to see if they’re breathing and/or had an accident. I always check for breathing. 32 years of working with kids and elderly and one child of my own, I look for breathing by automatically. The ladies that live in this home never have accidents. I do not check for accidents. That would be an invasion of privacy imo, for them specifically. I just assume they didn’t info walk into the rooms and it smells ok. They’d wake up if they did have accidents anyway. 

We cannot cheat on logging bed checks, because the computer logs what time you enter it. This means if you do sleep on the job, you better be awake at least every hour to log the bed checks. Drunk text boss is on board with this and like “yeah we have to do what they say” but the other two staff ladies are outraged. It’s honestly funny and sad at the same time to listen to them become so appalled at having to do their job, and stay awake on the job lol. And these are women basically old enough to be my mother. I don’t express out loud how funny and sad I find them. I just smile and nod, because I want them on my good side. 

One of them actually said it was abuse to check on them every hour. It’s not abuse. You just don’t want to do it. 

To be honest, I could never sleep at night knowing I was getting n paid to be in charge of five vulnerable people. I would be scared to death and doing their job checks anyway. Especially since like I said, people with intellectual disabilities have a slightly lower life expectancy, and these ladies are basically there. I would NOT be able to sleep at ALL. 

I do not want to mention to these to coworkers that live in caregiving jobs are all over indeed. Not a lot of people want them, because most people have a place to live. I used to like them when I was living with my parents and my daughter spent the weekend with her father. It was the perfect way to get away for a weekend and get paid for it. And I was allowed to sleep, but didn’t except for just an hour or two at a time!   They could go to any other place and do them and probably get paid better than here. I just don’t want to say it out loud, because in the new person. And they don’t seem to be holding the changes against me, which is REALLY NICE. They’re mad at the company and know it’s not “my fault”. 

I’m not sleeping very well at all, because on my shifts I have my alarm set every hour on the hour. When it goes off I do the checks. I do some household chores that don’t take long, then just hang out on the couch doing the bed checks when the alarm goes off. When 6:30 am comes around, one of the ladies checks her sugar. I start giving meds after that. The resident ladies actually make breakfast themselves. They have rotating jobs of cook and dishwasher, although this morning I was the dishwasher. Yes I’m dozing off in those interim hours between bed checks a couple times a night. Because of that and my daily 6 am Red Bull so I can focus on meds, I don’t come home and sleep immediately. I’m really just sleeping on my nights off. It has to change. 

One way I’m able to sleep during the day is if I take my anxiety meds, gabapentin. But I’m trying to only do this once a week. Gabapentin is hard to get, and I need to have a stash of it in case my anxiety gets really bad. Acquiring it is a delicate balance of finding a doctor who will prescribe it, keep prescribing it, and a pharmacy who will fill it. So far so good. I can get another three months worth on 8/21, and there will be one more refill which I can probably get November 21. Being the only thing that works for my severe anxiety though it needs to last. I can’t just be like “I’m going to pop some gabapentin just because I want to sleep today!”  If I keep that shit up, it will disappear.