Her experience (continued)

We talked for what seemed to be hours, although it was only like 2. She has been with the Golden Gate Regional Center for almost 30 years, and she has learned to endure different things. Every day is a learning experience for her because she doesn't know what will walk into her door or what kind of case she will have next. She's not so much in the field anymore, but she does train and manage her team to be one of the best throughout this center. She specifically said that it's this "excitement" that still manages to keep her there and keep her wanting to know more and find out a lot more than she has seen already.

Her experience

We finally had some time to sit down and simply talk more about her experience and how everything flows together and why it flows together with her. Here's a little background history on her, her sister has a condition, to be exact I'm not too sure. However, she knew and learned how to deal with her sister and she loved her sister dearly. So as she was growing older she realized that what she wanted to do was to help out kids that were like her sister, because she knew that that wouldn't be an easy task, yet she also knew that someone had to do it, or else nobody would.

Continuation

Anyway, what happened was that the baby was soon born and there were a lot of complications to her, and a lot of work had to be done. Her parents weren't going to give up though. They fought and they still continued to fight for their baby girl. Until sadly, the baby girl passed away. This was a tragic accident and because the patient was so young this almost drove my mentor to quit being a social worker. But one thing she learned was that, her parents learned to appreciate everything a lot more, and they said it was all thanks to her.

Another case

As we still continued to talk and discuss how it was going to be for me to actually be a social worker, she told me about what other types of cases she had to endure. For example she talked about this one case where, it was a couple and they weren't disabled or anything of that matter. So why were they in this social workers office right? Well, turns out their baby was diagnosed Down syndrome. So it wasn't the parents who were there for them, but for their child.

Continuation

They were fine up until one day when the husband calls Juliet and tells her that his wife fell and it seems like she's dead. As a social worker you need to learn how not to become so emotionally attached because things like this could happen to any of your patients, but she dashed out there and made sure the husband was alright and they had called the paramedics. They said they wouldn't take the body because they had no where to put it in the morgue. Juliet had to call everywhere to be able to have someone take her body. She said this was one of the hardest cases because they were both in it together, and now it's just only one.

One of her first cases

In the case she told me about, which was when she was first starting out to be out on the field. She talked about a married couple and how both of them were sick. They needed to have financial aid and receive money because they couldn't always make ends meet with the few hours they could work. They had moved out and found a place to stay in and they were perfectly fine for a couple of months. My mentor, Juliet, would go do random checkups to see how they were doing.

Case

As my mentor was talking to me about certain cases that stuck through with her and made her want to quit and just give up. It made me think and realize that maybe this isn't the major I want to pursue in life and maybe I'm not cut out for the job. But when thing that she told me about this was that all her hard work and all her determination made staying as a social worker worth every bit of it because the feeling of helping someone was the most rewarding thing . It's not about the money or how high of a position you have, it's about what you do to make a difference in someone's life.