The Social NetWorker

Outside Looking In (Part One)

(This is a guest post by Megan Elizabeth Morris.)

I wrote last week about making it easy for the people who need your help to find you. Of course, it's one thing to speculate about it objectively -- but it's quite another to find that a friend is occupying one of those "gaps in the system".

I've known Angel for more than ten years, and I know her pretty well. (I lived in her house for eight months when I first moved to Austin -- that's friendship!) Angel has a daughter named Michelle, and Michelle isn't much taller than a kindergartener despite the fact that several weeks ago, Michelle turned fifteen. This has to do with a rare condition called CHARGE syndrome, which not only affects her growth, but numerous other aspects of her development.

Michelle is this amazing bastion of determination. Most CHARGE babies die before turning two years old -- but Michelle is still thriving at fifteen, as little as she is. Just in the last six months, she started walking reliably without help. Her progress is slow, but every time I turn around she's doing something she's never done before (or finding new and creative ways to get herself into trouble!).

There were reams of complications and difficult prognoses, but Angel received a lot of help from friends and family, and a lot of assistance from "the system" in those first months after Michelle was born. Angel recounted the list: "When I called the church to let them know the baby had been born and there were problems, our parish priest was on his way out the door to say the noon mass, which he offered up for Michelle. The assistant pastor then came to the hospital to see us, and perform an anointing of the sick. Over the next 24 hours, the whole parish seemed to rally around our family. Some brought over food so we didn't have to try to cook, others would come and watch the older children so we could spend time at the hospital. We were very blessed." And then, she said, there was the hospital social worker.

She told me that this social worker pretty much just showed up one day while they were at the hospital. She walked into the room, explained that she was part of the "transition to home" process, and proceeded to take care of everything that was necessary to Angel receiving assistance for Michelle's care. She got them set up with an Easter Seals case worker. She connected all the dots, and they were in the system.

"The paper work she did in those two or three visits seemed to be the magic formula," Angel told me. "After that I was in the system, and things just happened."

Angel doesn't know exactly how this came about, but it did. Somehow she got all the help she needed in those first four years. Michelle has grown slowly but steadily into an incredible, indefatigable person who, though she doesn't quite communicate the same way most of the rest of us do, says her piece loud and clear just the same. That's the great part of the story -- that someone, somewhere, created a system that Angel and Michelle could benefit from easily.

Could Michelle have disappeared from our lives just as easily, without such a system? Where would Angel have found herself without the assistance she was offered, without even having to search for it? She's right, it's a real blessing, and it's exactly the sort of amazing thing that can happen when it's easy to get help.

But it doesn't always work that way.

Megan Elizabeth Morris (email)
Ms. Morris writes at Personal Revelations of the Magnificent Megan M. Megan Elizabeth Morris, or The Magnificent Megan M., [proper noun]: Superhuman font of knowledge, skill, determination & resourcefulness. Exudes enzymes that cause others to surpass their potential. Master thinker; writes, designs, manages, ideastorms, markets, inspires, connects, grows, teaches, makes things happen, changes the world, and throws a mean right hook. (Okay. Not the last one. Well! Not literally.)