A is for Ambulance

This week was the second time this year that I have had to call the ambulance for a student who got hurt. A few weeks ago it was because one of our autistic students in the special day class tried to hug another student and ended up hurting the other student’s neck and she passed out. I rode to the hospital with her and ended up being violently sick for the rest of the day because I rode in the back of the ambulance. 

This time a student in the same class got overstimulated for some reason and started to spin around, and then fell and gashed his head open on the forehead. It took about six of us to try to hold him still because he got hysterical once he saw blood. We kept him still until the ambulance and his father got there. 

I knew he was going to be okay but before the father got there, I began to feel a lot of stress that he was going to yell and curse me out for the accident. I wanted to protect myself from being yelled at so I told him he should go in the ambulance with his son and that I would pick him up later and bring him back to his car. I figured that showing the father that I would go above and beyond for him would help create a bit more trust because I do not know the father. I was so nervous about it but the father never called me to be picked up. I decided to call later and he was fine. 

That night as I was driving home, I realized that something from a few weeks before must have really affected me much more than I thought, causing me to have anxiety about the father attacking me. I will get into that story at another time but one parent was harassing me for about 8 weeks and it got really ugly and irrational until she finally ended up leaving the school. With that parent, I was not doing anything wrong but she tried to blame me and try to control everything that was happening at the school. With this newest ambulance incident, I had to remind myself that I didn’t do anything wrong, that it was an accident and that I was just having anxiety over the previous harassment that I had received. 

It's frustrating being blamed for things that are not in my control and it’s frustrating to deal with an emergency at the same time that I am dealing with fear of being blamed or attacked. But, I suppose that is the name of the game with being a school site administrator. Hopefully, over time I will grow thicker skin and it won’t bother me so much. Until then I will work hard to build relationships with parents so that if and when something does happen that I have a little dividend in the trust bank with them. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.