Another Music Therapist Pivot in COVID-19 Times

I am getting ready to head into work in about 90 minutes. In the past week, COVID-19 has arrived at my long-term residential facility, and we are facing yet another series of changes in how we care for the clients in our care. I turned on my phone to find nine messages from work about an upcoming faculty meeting and the news that all students will be learning virtually. I am not sure what that means - in the recent past, we have only done paper packets which is not all that suitable for music therapy, but I know we will find a plan and will continue to engage with our clients in the ways we have to in order to keep going.

I awoke this morning after an anxiety dream where one of my clients grabbed me and then started biting my broken fingers. When I started myself awake (in the dream, I was trying to get away from the client), my fingers were fine, there was no pain, and I was just wide awake...at 2:45am. No going back to sleep for me. This is not an uncommon way of waking for me, especially on Mondays, but this awakening routine was something that I could have done without today. After the startle waking, getting nine group text messages just seemed to increase my stress level to the very tippy top!

I am feeling somewhat confident that my interns and I can transition into a more virtual type of interaction, if we can use the internet to either stream or post videos. I am not as confident that I can translate what we do in our sessions into worksheets. If I have to do worksheets, I am going to bring in all my resources to fill up the hours at work. I have much more sitting here than I have at work, mainly because I like to work on these types of fun things here at home, and then there is a clear break for intellectual property reasons. If I am using my own resources, then there is not as much of a question about who owns the products. If I am using work resources, then all sorts of questions pop up. Anyway, I foresaw that this situation would arise eventually, and seeing that, I changed some of my internship requirements to accommodate the new way we music therapists do therapy - telehealth.

All of my interns from now on will be submitting three telehealth live sessions as part of their therapeutic music experience (TME) file. They also have to establish a video presence for their marketing packet - either through a personal YouTube channel or DVD production software program. I think that now that telehealth has become the way we do things, it will continue to be part of being a music therapist from now on. Interns need to be aware of that and need to be prepared for questions about telehealth in future interviews. We haven't done any type of telehealth yet, so I wanted to make sure that my interns get practice in this way in interacting.

That's not all that we're doing these days, though. I've been asking my interns to fill up their time gaps (present since we cannot currently see individual clients based on how we have to use our music therapy space) in making TME videos. I started a YouTube channel last Monday and will be talking to interns about a release of their images, intellectual property, and videos on that platform for use for my clients. We only post original or public domain songs on the YouTube channel. We have another way to get access to videos on our server that will allow us to share more stuff. I need to take in as many resources as I can, just in case. 

Good thing I've prepared myself for all this over the years. I know how to run webinars. I know how to produce YouTube videos. I know how to make worksheets and visual aids to go along with songs that I compose. I am comfortable seeing my face and hearing my voice on video (even though I still don't like what I sound like...that's a whole other topic!). I know how to configure my software to make videos with interesting little elements. I am open to learning more and more about all of this to make my efforts what I want them to be for my clients. I am interested in how we will be moving forward, especially when I am not sure if work will have the resources that I need to do the things I want to do...

Time to pivot again.

I feel like there has been a pivot every other week since March. Some of these have been pivots that have been forced on us all. Others have been simply my own. Yet others have forced just on me, and I keep spinning...around and around. The next pivot will happen in about three hours when I sit in our faculty meeting and try to interpret what my role in my facility will be. After I get that figured out, I will need to figure out how to translate that into what my interns will be doing, and then I need to contact academic directors to explain the change in duties and anything else that will spin into something different.

Is this what resilience is? Constantly being able to pivot when circumstances force you into corners? I think this is what resilience is. 

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