rustyshacklford

So I started my new job, its very much like my old job just with diffrent co-workers. Its still under the same umbrella of state government support for persons with developmental disabilities, I still work with clients who have been removed from their families due to abuse or neglect or clients whose disability(s), behavior problems or lack of outside support left their families unable to care for them. I spent a lot of my time in meetings reviewing the case historys of my new clients, usually it helps me understand what have and have not been effective therapy techniques for them in the past and often explains the problems my clients are having, for example, a severely retarded 18 year old male who was removed from family care after he was brought into the ER with rectal bleeding and was discovered to have basiclly been pimped out for years by his parents; now 5 years later he doesnt respond well to being given intimate care, like showers, from male staff. Knowing his history makes this perfectly understandable and we adjust his envronment and staffing to accomadate his needs, thats not so hard. I've always seen the things we (the entity of service providers for such people) as strongly benefitial. All that being said here is the story I intended to tell here.

While sitting through a meeting on one of my new clients history I saw something which confused me in the paperwork from his yearly physical, (it was in terrable Dr's handwriting so my 1st reaction was that I had misread it) I turned to his Dr and asked "what is this?" to which he responded "absent testicles" in the most matter of fact way. Yes, I had read it correctly so my next question is "Is that a common natural defect?" (many people we work with have deformaties) and he chuckled and said "no, of course not", I then ask "why was this done?" and the Dr goes on to explain (in a condecending tone that says he can tell I've only been in this field a couple of years and he considers himself an expert) that this client was in an institution for almost 40 years and at the time the client became sexually mature (12 years old) it was standard practice to remove the testicles to prevent "violent outbursts or sexual conduct". I'm stunned... I just sit there trying to take this in, my mind is racing, this is not the fucking dark ages were are talking about a client who is middle aged, this was common treatment less than 30 years ago. Then he says "you know, like when you fix a dog", I feel my throat getting tight, I'm going to cry and I'm damn sure not doing it in front of this asshole Dr so I excuse myself and bawl in a bathroom stall as quietly as I can for about 10 minutes then fix my make-up and go back to work with my opinion of my job and the entity I work for completely changed.