August 2004 Archives

The discharge conference was continued on Friday morning August 27. The resident who had been involved on Tuesday was there again. There was a second resident too. I think the conference was intended, from Dr. Perlov's perspective, as a teaching conference for the residents.

I went in understanding that he had encouraged Jan and me to tolerate some of Dave's choices, to stay in touch and to support him emotionally. At the same time, he had been very vague and his vagueness supported inconsistency in our dealings with Dave and getting drawn in to supporting his risky and unhealthy behaviour.

At his invitation - which was a trap - I covered the events since Tuesday. Dave got restless and Dr. Perlov interrupted and attacked me. He said I had a pedantic style and I was boring him. I got two things out of that. First, he was establishing to Dave that he was prepared to take Dave's side and attack me. Second, he may have been trying to help me to see why Dave has a hard time listening to me.

Dave came to my house Wednesday evening August 25. We had dinner and watched some episodes of Clerks on DVD. He went into his room and got some clothes. He took some accessories from his old Gameboy to use with a Colour Gameboy that he picked up somewhere. He took some Ramen noodles and Lipton soup packets. He did wander around a bit, which made me nervous because he has used other visits to the house to help himself. I thought the visit went well. I told him I needed to know when and where to pick him up on Thursday for Court. He said he was not going back to the hotel and he wanted me to pick him up and get him to Court.

During the first session of the dischage conference on Tuesday (August 24) the resident reported that Dave did not present the symptoms of bipolar disorder, with the qualification that Dave had not been willing to discuss his thoughts with the team. The senior psychiatrist, Dr. Perlov, did not disagree but suggested that there may be a bipolar disorder which has not been diagnosed because it is hard to diagnose in teens with Dave's temperament and history of drug use. He qualified his remarks by saying he was not involved with Dave's assessment in February or last week and had taken over temporarily while Dave's assigned doctor, Dr. Katz, was away. He said he only had a brief time to review the material and a brief time with Dave.

Dave was discharged from hospital yesterday morning, and was put into a so-called emergency placement by CFS. An emergency placement is a largely unsupervised placement in a motel on Portage Avenue West near the Grace Hospital. By the time I got the message and called the motel, Dave had left to see his girlfriend. I checked again this morning and he did not come back last night. I have a phone number for the apartment where his girlfried is staying, and I called him. He took the phone but he ended the call quickly with an excuse that somebody else needed to use the phone. He called me back later on my cell phone. He said he had returned to the motel and he was talking with a mouth full of food. He wanted to get some clothes and he agreed to have dinner too.

Dave has been staying at PY1 - the Adolescent Psychiatry inpatient unit at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center - since Friday August 13. He has been a voluntary inpatient for assessment. This represents a little progress. In February 2004 he had been admitted for a few days and started an assessment but he ran away.

On the first day of his hospital stay, he seemed to be confused and frightened. He was honest with me about his drug use and, at least that day, he appeared to be sincere about getting help to stop using all drugs except marijuana.

The forecast for Saturday night and Sunday had been for rain. It didn't rain. It was a cloudy, cool day but the sun came out and it warmed up enough for me to put my fleece away during the afternoon.

I started my day with a session that I will remember for a long time. The session leader was Brian McNeill, and the other participants were the new Quebecois group Genticorum, and John Reischman and the Jaybirds.

It was cold and cloudy all day, but it did not rain. Claire and I arrived around 10:00 AM, a short time after the gates opened but well before the first sessions of the day. I had a good day, and enjoyed several acts. I wanted to see Ron Kavana and Brian McNeill, singer-songwriters from Ireland and Scotland. I have read about their music, but I haven't seen them perform. McNeill's discography is rather thin for such an accomplished and experienced writer and performer, and not very accessible in Canada.

On Friday, the Edmonton Folk Festival offers sessions (at some other festivals these would be called workshops) on 4 stages from 6:00 to 9:00 PM and three acts on the mainstage. The weather was warm, but not hot in the late afternoon and it was cloudy. There was a forecast threat of evening rain, but it did not rain during the evening. It cooled gradually.

Claire and I stayed in Canmore on Tuesday after the Canmore Folk Festival, and drove to Edmonton on Wednesday.

We had planned to try some hiking and camping those days but we adapted to necessity. We had the car in a garage in Canmore to look at a transmission fluid leak, and managed to get it looked at very inexpensively, but we had to wait for the work. We spent the time with camping stuff - taking care of camp, cooking meals, walking, reading. We went directly to my friend Randy's house in Edmonton and I had the car looked at again to deal with a problem I had noticed in Canmore which had not been addressed at the garage in Canmore.

We arrived at the Edmonton Folk Festival site in Gallagher Park in time to exchange our tickets for the weekend wristband passes and to pitch a tarp halfway up the hill.

This counted as one of my better days, among many good days at summer folk festivals. It was sunny warm day, with moderate winds and I was able to leave the cold weather gear in the dry sack.

We started with the Canmore Pancake breakfast - pancakes and sausages served outdoors in front of the Legion Hall, no charge, donations for the Bow Valley Food Bank taken with thanks, with local amateur musicians playing rock and blues standards. We went to line up at the main gate to buy our day pass, and we had a spot of luck. The main gate wasn't supposed to open until 10:00 AM and meanwhile people with weekend passes would be admitted through the other gate at 9:30. However the ticket sellers at the main gate came out and sold passes at 9:15 and we were able to enter and to get a spot in the first ring of trees by the main stage. We had warm sunshine during the first part of the morning and shade during most of the afternoon.

After being delayed by car trouble, Claire and I drove to Canmore Sunday morning August 1, set up camp at a campground in Bow Valley Provincial Park and drove to Canmore. We had missed the Saturday evening concert, but we were in time for the rest of the Festival, except for the first half hour of the daytime workshops on Sunday.

It was a cool day. It had rained early in the morning, but the rain held off for the rest of the day. In fact, when the wind gusted, dust clouds blew across the festival site and we got quite dusty and dirty. It was good to be back in Canmore, even on a cool, cloudy and windy day. I have good memories of other festivals there, and there is something about sitting at the workshop stages in the open field, looking at the mountains on each side of the valley, and the crowd, and listening to beloved performers...

I'm posted the first version of this post on Wednesday August 4 from an Internet Cafe in Canmore, Alberta, where I was camping on holidays. I came for the Canmore Folk Festival and arrived in time to see most of the Festival in spite of car trouble. I finished this post from my friend Randy's house in Edmonton on August 5.

I had a call Wednesday morning from Red, the manager of the group home where Dave is nominally staying. He said Dave had come back after several nights awol, but was voicing ideas of hopelessness and worthlessness. Red wanted to call in the Mobile Crisis Intervention unit to meet and assess Dave.