I too have been in contact with child life specialist more than I care too and ultimately lost my daughter last month. There are some absolutely amazing ones out there as well as some really really really bad ones that have made a very stressful situation more stressful than imaginable! I will write some here, but by all means feel free to PM me.
Ok....the good......there was one child life specialist that goes above and beyond to meet each and every child she can, learn how that child is and treat the children age appropriately. Her name is Jen and she works in Rainbow Babies and Children's hospital in Cleveland. She always took the time to learn which children need extra attention, which ones enjoyed a more hands off approach, who was due for what treatment or when their surgery was, etc etc etc. Truly listening to the families needs and wishes makes all the difference in the world. Jen always went that extra mile.
Next is another Jen, while very nice, she is more shy and never "reads" the kids. She was never on the same page as how the child was feeling and too introverted to be able to fully help my daughter.
The absolute worst was another CL called Catherine! Now she is in charge of the pre-op/post-op. Her first mistake was treating my 14 year old daughter as if she were 5 years old. My daughter was "brilliant beyond her years" so she really didn't take kindly to being treated like a little one. Then my only request during surgery was to borrow a pager from the pediatric surgery floor since my daughter was on a different surgical floor. That took quite a long time to get a hold of and when she finally did she couldn't even work the thing. This was very sad as she works with these pagers all the time on the Peds. surg. floor. So after we finally got it working (about 12:45), we are then told that we had to be back in the surgical area by 2:00 otherwise no one would page us. So we made sure we were back before 2:00 and waited for hours. While sitting in the waiting room, all of a sudden the pager goes off and it's the CL paging. I tried getting someone's attention and the nurse then tells me that the CL was looking for me, but that I was not in the waiting room and that she wanted to let me know that my daughter was sent to PICU. Mind you this is about 4:30 now and I have not left the area since before 2:00. I was in a total frantic rage because 1) I am in shock my daughter is going to PICU, 2) there was NO WAY the CL looked for me and 3) now worried I am going to miss talking with the surgeon as he never came out yet and 4) needing to go over to PICU immediately to find out what's going on. When we get to PICU my daughter isn't even there!!! Now was even more worried that I was going to miss talking with the surgeon. Then she has the nerve to come to the PICU unit and tell me that she looked for me!!! I called her a liar straight to her face and explained how we rushed to be back before 2 and never left afterwards. I had to tell her that she DID NOT step foot in that waiting room. She then admitted that she only looked through the glass block on the walls and didn't see any "shadows". It literally would have taken her three steps to walk in that room and she was too lazy to do that. Then after seeing how mad I was, she continued by asking me if I had ever been in PICU, asking what she could show me, etc etc. I was so angry I told her NOTHING, you have already done enough damage, GO AWAY! Yet she still didn't get it and continued to make me more upset. Realize if you ever make a parent that angry that it is best to just walk away. The extremely sad part, was she was training someone that day! I certainly hope that girl realized some of the mistakes Catherine made.
That just means I go home...have a good cry...and eat ice cream...
