My Job Taking Care of Mentally Retarded Adults (Continued)

In 2001 I acquired a job taking care of mentally retarded adults at the Lurleen B. Wallace Developmental Center in Decatur, Alabama, about thirty miles from my home in Athens, Alabama. My co-workers were mostly good people. There was one old man there (whose name I will omit here) who took especially good care of the clients. He was a slow worker, but he was compassionate. Some of the clients were hard to work with. One of the clients would attack one of my co-workers if he saw her. We never figured out why this was the case. We always had to pull him off her.

After about eighteen months of working at the Lurleen B. Wallace Developmental Center the Center closed. I then moved to a facility call Partlow. I worked with many of the same clients that I had worked with at the Wallace Center, as they had been transferred. These clients were considered to be profoundly retarded, meaning they never learned how to speak, and some of them never even learned how to walk. There were some exceptions. Some of the clients could walk and talk just fine, but they were too retarded to live in society. 

After about eighteen months at Partlow I transferred to North Alabama Regional Hospital. North Alabama Regional Hospital was a commitment hospital for mentally ill adults. The patients here had normal intelligence. The only reason they were committed to this hospital is because they had become psychotic and were a danger to themselves and others. I enjoyed working at this facility much more than working with the mentally retarded. These were mostly normal adults. Sometimes I wondered why they had been committed. They usually only stayed with us for a couple of months before they were discharged. Some stayed much longer if they were more disabled. Some of them had wild delusions. They were very religious (often), but mostly they were normal adults.