Sunday, November 17, 2024

 Sunday, November 17, 2024 

     When I spoke to Judy on Friday, she told me she spent the night in the Emergency Room with her daughter-in-law. Adam, her son, called her the other night and asked her to take Jazzy to the hospital. She was running a temperature of 103 degrees and was delirious. 

    The emergency room was packed. Jazzy's gurney was placed in a corridor.  She was there overnight because there wasn't a single bed available. When I was in the hospital with my broken shoulder and elbow, I learned that half the beds in the hospital were for long-term care patients who couldn't find a place in a regular long-term care facility.

    The hospital immediately identified a urinary tract infection and gave Jazzy antibiotics.  Further blood tests revealed she had mononucleosis, a highly contagious disease.  They put her in an isolation unit.  I considered the impact on the family if everyone got it. It would have been a disaster.  They realized the antibiotics she got upon arriving impacted the blood test. She didn't have mono. They kept her for an additional night, concerned about sepsis. The UTI became so advanced because it was symptom-free.  I know that happens in older women. I didn't think it could happen in a 330-something

    After church, I walked to the shoe shop in the Kona Inn Village Shopping Center.  The pair of Oofos I bought on sale arrived. There are little plastic things to display them and a foam form to hold their shape. I always drop those off at the shop. They can be reused by the shopkeeper. Something else I don't have to add to the landfill.

    I got a call from someone wanting to buy another solar panel. They were just on their way to Costco, five miles from me. He would stop by on his way home.   

    I got a call from the mother of a twelve-year-old girl in seventh grade who responded to the ad my niece Shivani posted on her Next Door app in Pacifica, CA.  While in the middle of that call, the man interested in the solar panel arrived. I walked quickly to the side door, let him in, and pointed to the panels he was interested in. He passed me a hundred-dollar bill as I left the room to continue my telephone conversation with my prospective new client. As I passed through the living room, I saw Joseph. Oh, I had promised to get his clothes off the line. I turned to do that. Much of my life is empty of external stimulation; then, I have moments like this where everything happens at once.

    The mother of seventh-grade LV said she was impressed with my qualifications. Her daughter had already received a lot of tutoring. She had problems with both reading and math. She was still working with a math tutor. The reading teacher moved, and her mother was looking for someone else. Since the girl lived in California, I could work with her midday with the three-hour time difference.  Local clients are available between 3:30 and 5:30, so I have little to do during school hours and am slammed in the afternoon.     From what the mother said, LV had some problems decoding two-syllable words and could use some additional help in reading fluency as well as comprehension.  Some difficulties with word recognition and more serious comprehension issues are also present. Her literature comprehension was on the 5th-grade level; her comprehension of informational text was on a third-grade level.   I told the mother I would start with a strategy for decoding multi-syllable words, then work on comprehension, and finally increase word recognition skills.

   Judy said she saw my ad on Next Door and had no idea why I wasn't getting many responses. The need for reading tutoring is legion. Many kids are behind grade level, some because of the damage from the Whole Language Method, some because of the gap created by the pandemic, and some because they would have had difficulties learning to read with the best the classroom approach to reading had to offer.