Best Laid Plans, Then WHAMMO!

The last two days have been a bit challenging for me. I got hit on the top of the head by a client (whose teacher laughed and said, "My bad," when it happened - Gee, thanks for your support) on Monday in the first group, and then, when I started driving home, I started with an ocular migraine. The ocular sparkles happened for about 30 minutes and then the headache came. I called my Dad when it started and got the daily call over with because I knew that this one would be a doozy - and it was. Now, I am not entirely sure that the migraine was due to being hit on the head - I get plenty of migraines that aren't preceded by a hit - but I'm not entirely unsure of that either. I did try something new to eat in the morning before going to work, and that could have been the trigger as well. It is also possible that both things contributed to my pain. I will never really know,

Anyway...

I got home, took some Tylenol, turned on the tv, and got into bed. I then proceeded to sleep for 13 hours with only the occasional rousing to check the time and the headache situation before falling back asleep. When I woke up yesterday morning, the headache was still very much prevalent, and I decided to cancel music therapy services for the day. I asked my interns to stay home and work on their assignments, I cancelled the webinar that I had scheduled for the evening, and I spent another day in bed, resting my eyes and trying to conquer the headache.

Today I feel a bit better. The headache is down to occasional twinges rather than constant pounding, and I feel like I can handle being at work - sunglasses on and perhaps sitting in my office rather than in the center of the energy of the music therapy session. I have to do some sort of adaptation to be able to stand being around all those people and all the sounds that are part of being in music therapy. If I was running the sessions, I would probably bring out my sick day plan and we'd do quiet, music themed centers (the reason that I have a Teachers Pay Teachers store, by the way - to share my music themed centers that I use for quiet times in the music therapy room) rather than anything that required singing or instrument play. I am not in charge at the moment, so I will make adaptations based on what I can tolerate at any given time.

We have two more days of this shortened session schedule. On Monday, we will be welcoming our day students back to the facility and will be returning to our "pre-COVID" schedule. I am looking forward to having more time at work to do the things that I can (and will) only do at work. I am also looking forward to seeing my day students again. Most of them will be returning to our school, so it will be nice to see them and to see what they have been doing since we had to close right after Spring Break. I am hoping that they are able to return to the structure of school with limited struggling.

I am preparing myself for lots of testing and establishing leadership roles in sessions and arguments and more testing.

I wonder what my peers and I would have done if this had happened during our own matriculation. Back then, there was no internet, so we would have had to either work on our own, mail things to our teachers, or wait until school could meet again and be significantly behind in all things. I guess I am glad that this happened at a time when most people have at least some sort of access to the internet (almost everyone has a phone these days if nothing else). It would have been so much more complicated in the 80s when computers were not things that people had access to on a regular basis. I remember one of my friends introducing me to the concept of the internet with her huge modem and telephone connection thingy. It was her gateway to the bigger world, but she was the only person who had anything like that at all! She was a gamer and still is - in fact, she works for the Xbox division at Microsoft, so she found her world early - through a computer modem.

I am hoping that the next couple of days go as planned and that my students will find their ways back into the routine of live school and music therapy again. I miss the way it used to be, but I am looking forward to the way it will be from now on...