The ABCs of Me - A is for Anxiety

A is for Anxiety, Part One

So, to start this blog series off, I'm just going to jump right into the deep end.

I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in 1999. Here's what happened...

Sometime in late 1993, I began working as a residential caregiver in group homes. For the first five years, I worked with two clients, both relatively high functioning, and it was mostly one-on-one care. We had a really great staff team, and I found that I really loved the work. When that company folded in 1998, I moved over to my boss' other, larger company. I began working with a variety of adults and minors, in a number of settings, both residential and occupational, and on a broad spectrum of disabilities. It was the most rewarding work I had ever done. I was making a positive difference in the lives of others. In addition to it being a great job, it paid well, had benefits, and I liked my co-workers.

I had seen my share of violent behaviour in the workplace; I had a client threaten to self-harm with a large kitchen knife (it was an empty threat, but I disarmed him and locked up all implements that could be used for harm as a safety measure), almost got hit with a kettle full of boiling water (a co-worker took it in the back), been scratched, etc. This was just part of the job in some cases. Our company was pro-active and gave us yearly classes on non-violent crisis intervention, teaching us how to deal with and de-escalate behaviour, and if that didn’t work, how to get out of choke holds, limb holds, hair grabs, bites, how to use a violent client’s own kinetic energy to avoid injury, and how to properly subdue a client to restore calm. I felt confident that I could avoid serious injury in the workplace as a result.


I won a full-time contract position at a home in early 1999. The house had just undergone a large staff turnover, including the manager (Nb. There is pretty high turnover in the care field, so this was not viewed as unusual). There were three clients, all blind, two deaf, one profoundly handicapped. We’ll call them Mr. Hands, Ms. Teary and Mr. Angry. Ms. Teary needed the most direct care, being profoundly disabled. Mr. Angry was fairly self-sufficient, having gradually lost his sight during adulthood. He would often sit in his chair, absently flipping through a paperback as if to read it (though they were as often as not upside down). He was (understandably) very angry about the loss of his sight, and would sometimes raise his fists, shaking them while vocalizing, but that was about it. Mr. Hands, the client that I was hired to work with primarily, had a history of inappropriate sexual behaviour whilst institutionalized, and liked to try to touch his female workers’ leg whilst sitting on the couch.

I got married during my tenure there, in April 1999. It was touch and go whether I’d get the time off that I’d requested for my wedding and two week honeymoon in Florida, as the manager dragged her heels in approving it, and in notifying me; I only found out on the Monday before the wedding that I had the time off, despite having submitted my request mid-January. You can imagine the amount of unnecessary stress that this created.

The request for time off is but one example of how this manager liked to control the staff. She would often change our schedules around and only let us know the day before that week’s schedule started. She selected a low-fat menu that rotated every 6 weeks (without taking the changing seasons into account), and we were not permitted to deviate from that. Likewise, she instituted changes in how the grocery shopping was done in the spring of 1999. Whereas we had done it weekly, but also picked up fresh produce as needed, it could now only be done on one weekday a week, as that was the day she was in until 5 PM, and we could only shop at the grocery store down the road from us, so there was no more looking for bargains to save money in the budget. Here’s how grocery shopping looked: we would build the shopping list, which had to be approved by her beforehand. Then we had to go to the store, ring up only what was on the list, nothing more, and then have the cashier suspend the sale while we called the manager to come to the store, inspect our cart to double-check that there was no contraband being snuck into the house. Only then would she pull out the house bank card and pay the bill. This responsibility had always been assigned to the key workers (I was one) prior to this woman’s “reign of terror”, with nary a concern from the company’s directors. This was a house policy, not company policy. The staff at the store must’ve loved this as much as us, and should have been nominated for sainthood in how they handled it – they would often open a checkout just for us so that other customers wouldn’t get mad at us, and always did it with a smile and a sympathetic nod. But enough about that.

It was in June 1999 that I was assaulted.

It was a warm, sunny day, and I was working with Mr. Angry. He was following a doctor-planned exercise regime that had him riding a stationary bike for 20 minutes per session. So we were at the local rec center in the exercise room doing just that. He was slightly agitated, simply by virtue of his task for the day. The staff team tried to ameliorate that by having him go out for coffee afterwards, one of his favourite activities.
He was about 16 minutes into his 20-minute bike workout when he got down, raised his fists and started vocalizing. I used hand-over-hand (h-o-h) sign language to tell him “More bike, please. 4 more minutes.” He sneered at that, but got back on the bike. Within a minute, he was back off of it, raising his fists angrily and yelling. Only this time, a lady was walking past him, holding an infant car seat with her baby in it. To avoid having him strike her, I put my forearms up on the outside of his fists to prevent him from lashing out. It worked, but he wasn’t any less angry. When he seemed to have calmed down, I started to h-o-h sign “more bike, please” once again.

I got as far as “More”. And that’s when he bit me.

I watched in horror as he brought his hand up towards his mouth, my own hand still resting on top. It occurred to me that he had stopped vocalizing, and in retrospect, I think that meant that his anger was no longer unfocused; he had made a decision to assault me.

In all honesty, this couldn’t have taken more than 10 seconds, tops. Probably more like 5 or 6 seconds, really. But it felt like an eternity, and it makes me marvel at how quickly the human mind can work, especially in a crisis.

My first thought was, “My God, he’s going to bite.” I could feel his teeth bite down, skipping over the bones and tendons until he had the veins and slack flesh of the back of my hand firmly between his upper and lower incisors. I could feel the skin breaking, and I was frozen. My second thought was a rapid-fire visual catalogue of the crisis intervention bite releases. So I tried the first one, which is pushing into the bite to force the jaw to open; but since his teeth were basically touching through my flesh, I couldn’t get his jaw to budge. The other release involved pushing into the cartilage on the underside of the nose. This is supposed to irritate the assailant enough to release from the bite. I didn’t think it was going to work, but I had to try it anyway. No luck; all it accomplished was turning Mr. Angry into Mr. VERY Angry. I felt desperate and tried an unsanctioned technique, and jabbed my thumb up behind his TM joint. Nothing.

I knew by the look on his face, and the strength by which he had hold of my skin, that he was going to tear away. The only thing I could do at that point was to put my other hand on his head, thumb on one temple, pinky finger on the other, and wait.

What felt like minutes passed, and then I felt the slightest pressure on my pinky finger, and noticed a flicker of movement to the left. So I followed through with it, and I felt him release my hand. My hand went suddenly cold, but it didn’t start bleeding right away. In light of that, and of the fact that Mr. Angry was now perfectly calm, I resumed h-o-h signing, “More bike, please.” And I got him back on the bike to finish those three minutes. I did that because I knew without a doubt that the next time he didn’t feel like riding the bike, he’d assault another staff member. And that couldn’t happen.

I should mention at this point that there were four or five other people in the exercise room at the time of the assault. At no point did any one of them say a word, or make a move. Nobody asked me if I was alright, or what was wrong with him. They all just stood there staring at us, then turned back to what they were doing before he bit me.

Once he was done on the bike, we went to the physio office next door to the exercise room so I could ask where the first aid attendant was. When the receptionist asked what bit me, I pointed to Mr. Angry. They boggled at that and directed me to the pool, and the first aid attendant on site. I got the same question from that guy while he disinfected the wound, which had now started to bleed a bit. While he filled out the paperwork, Mr. Angry started signing “coffee” over and over again, vocalizing and growing agitated. I had to h-o-h sign, “first aid now; coffee later”. I also made sure that I was positioned out of his reach. We finished up and went back to the house, where my co-worker got Mr. Angry a coffee while I started looking for WCB paperwork. I also called the manager’s cell phone to inform her of the incident.

This is where it really starts going downhill.

To begin with, in response to me telling her that he had bitten me, she asked, “What did you do?”, so I began to explain about the bite releases. That’s when she interrupted me to say, “No. What did you do to make him bite you?” I have to admit, I was struck speechless at first, but managed to recover enough to respond, “I prevented him from injuring a woman carrying a baby, and asked him to get back on the exercise bike.” She dropped that line of conversation and then took to reaming me out for not taking Mr. Angry to the neighborhood coffee shop as per his routine. By that point, I was upset at her assumption that I had done something wrong or inappropriate to invite this attack. I reminded her that injuries trump routines, and that my union, and the company directors would back me up on that. I then asked her where the WCB forms, were, as they were not in their assigned spot. She responded that she was in the midst of rearranging the files, and that I’d have to look for them. I was starting to bleed through the bandages, and it was starting to burn, like my hand was in a blast furnace. I remember the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear sounding in my head as I tried to tune out the pain in my hand. My co-worker, C, came into the office and told me to go sit down and elevate my hand while she looked. When she came to the kitchen, she had the forms, and some NSAIDs to try to dull the pain. I reminded her that she’d probably get in trouble for using house supplies for staff, and she said that this was more important. I called my doctor and arranged to go there straight from work.

By the time I’d driven the hour home, it had stopped bleeding again, but it still hurt like hell. The doctor that saw me cleaned it again, re-dressed it, and prescribed fairly heavy-duty antibiotics because, according to her, “the human mouth is a very nasty place”. I was to come in again the next day for monitoring. The swelling had increased by the next afternoon, but the doctor felt confident that the meds would work.
By that evening, my whole hand was severely swollen and was burning again. We happened to be over at my aunt and uncle’s place to visit, and my uncle asked if he could try a Reiki treatment on it to bring the swelling down. I was game, so he spent at least 30 minutes working – and sweating like crazy from the effort – and the result was a dramatic decrease in edema, and the burning sensation was lessened. When I went to the doctor the next day, she remarked on how well the antibiotics were bringing the swelling down. So I told her, “Actually, the thing that seemed to do the most good was the 30 minute Reiki session I had on it last night”. Surprisingly, she told me that if it was working, to keep doing it in conjunction with her treatment, as anything that worked was worth doing. When she undid the bandage, though, she could see that the infection had gotten worse, so she prescribed a week of IV antibiotics, meaning I had to report to the hospital every day for a week, one hand wrapped up like a mummy, and the other hand with a shunt left in. I had already been dubbed “Stumpy” because of the assault by my family, and when the hospital wrapped the shunt up in a mountain of gauze, both hands were rendered useless. I couldn’t drive, or brush my hair, or dress myself. So I moved in to my parents’ for the week, and they helped me. A friend drove me to the hospital every day, and I just basically sat around moping for a week.

Communication with work was less than pleasant, to say the least, as my manager was calling every day, demanding to know when I would be coming back. I had to tell her that I didn’t know, but since I still had an open, infected wound on my hand that precluded wearing latex gloves (and therefore, doing personal care for clients), it would have to be when my doctor cleared me to return. She demanded a letter from the doctor detailing when that would be. When I conveyed this to the doctor, my GP snorted and said something along the lines of, “When I’m bloody good and ready to let you go back, that’s when!” I really dreaded having to talk to her, as she had an accusatory tone, and didn’t seem to listen. He wrote a note for two more weeks.

WCB came through pretty quickly with wage coverage for my lost time, a full 2.5 weeks off. We’d have to wait and see if there was damage to the nerves and tendons. My stomach was in knots, as I was not looking forward to my return to the workplace, and I started daydreaming about quitting, and the look of shock on the manager’s face when I did.

Coming up next…A is for Anxiety, Part Two