The "Brian and I Are Officially Peer Mentors and We Have the Badges toProve It!", edition.

iPod shuffled to "Joy", Isaac Hayes. That's a pleasant surprise.  :-).  Lots of snow this morning.  And it's gonna keep on coming. And of course we have an event we must attend. Immediately after dialysis. Across town. And there is already a lot of snow. With much more to come. Yay life.!!!  Lol. Yes I'm dialyzing on Saturday morning...at 9:00 AM. But that's because we had the Peer Mentoring training yesterday.  All day. 9 to 5.  The training program was done by the National Kidney Foundation of Michigan for Greenfield Health Systems.

We?  Had training?  Yes. I learned how to mentor my peers and Brian learned how to mentor his peers. You know my peers are dialysis patients. But who are Brian's peers?  His peers are caregivers. :-)   There were 2 caregivers at training. My "helicopter" husband and a "helicopter" wife.  We represented centers within the Greenfield a Health Systems dialysis centers, with each of us initially serving our own centers. We learned empathetic listening, which appeared to be a difficult skill to learn.  Lol. Listening and hearing seemed to be a challenge. I'm not saying this in a bad way, but most people don't do active listening.  They want to respond midway through.  Remember when we learned, "seek first to understand, then to be understood"?  When asked, "How do you feel?", people would launch into an experience. It seemed it was difficult for people to express there own feelings. Just, "I feel; happy, sad, angry, upset, frustrated, etc   You try it. Reflective listening was also a challenge.  "I hear you saying....".  Or " I understand that  you are feeling...."  So we did a lot of role playing with feedback.  "Keep On Loving Me", The Whispers. Lol. I guess The Dramatics are taking a vacation. The Whispers stepped up.  I think we'll be fine mentors. And we'll get better with time. Oh yeah, they gave us fancy badges on lanyards. 

So Saturday at the clinic. I'm a visitor.  First I need to thank the staff for accommodating me. I made my request on Wednesday to come in on Saturday. I know from experience that they may not be able to make the assignment to as late as the day requested. I called yesterday.  The charge nurse said she was working on it as we spoke. The early chair was dependent on if a patient was still in the hospital.  The nurse called back and let me know a 6AM (first shift) was not available. The good news is the patient was discharged. I'm not wishing a hospital on anyone. Anyway, I did get a 9AM slot. Good enough.  I walked in and staff are , "why are you here today". The concern was I needed an extra day because I had excess fluid. People have been known to have so much fluid they need to come in on extra days. They've retained 7-10+ kilos.  Heck, I don't even know how you do that. Drink nonstop?  But no, I just missed my day because of training. :-)

So Brian and I will be practicing mentoring skills with each other, because one or both of will called to mentor. :-)  Signing off with Tears for Fears, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World". Make some good comfort food.  Stay warm.  Enjoy a good ol' snowy Michigan weekend. :-D.