Anyway, when Jamie came home from work yesterday, he told me about some more weird things that they manufacture.
Are you ready for this?
BODY BAGS.
Oh, and also, PART BAGS.
You know, Part Bags. The ones that hospitals use to put legs and arms and junk that they saw off and cut out of people in. Like a morbid, restaurant doggie-bag! :D
I'm beginning to see a slight pattern here. At first, everything that Ameratex manufactured seemed to be completely random stuff. And it pretty much is; I mean, what do motorcycle grease rags have to do with slings that people need to use whenever they hurt their arms or legs? Well, nothing, really, except for the fact that I guess both of those items are comprised of cloth and apparently involve sewing. So I guess basically, if there's any kind of item that people need to have manufactured, and the company Jamie works for has the appropriate equipment in place to manufacture it, then they manufacture it. They are even about to start making/printing those tarp-like signage banners you see hanging up on the outsides of stores. It's so random!
Well, at least there's never a dull moment. It would be pretty fun and interesting to work on making grease rags one day, and body bags the next.
Or how about this...imagine some biker dude in his garage working on his motorcycle (using one of the Christian Motorcycle Association grease rags that Jamie screen-printed at Ameratex to wipe his dirty hands on). But there's a really tight bolt that the dude is having trouble getting to turn loose (and he doesn't have any WD-40 laying around). So he literally wrenches and cuts his wrist trying to wring off the bolt (and ends up needing to use an arm-sling that Ameratex manufactured). But a few weeks later, something goes wrong, and the cut on the dude's wrist develops gangrene, so half of his arm has to be amputated (and the cut-off portion gets placed in a Part Bag manufactured by none other than Ameratex). And when the biker dude recovers enough from his amputation to finally be able to test-drive his motorcycle, he forgets that his cut-off hand was the one he used to use to mash the brake with, so he ends up careening down into the grand canyon (after slipping on a banana peel, of course). And then what do the paramedics use to store the biker dude's mangled corpse in? Why none other than a good ol' quality-made Ameratex body bag, what else? (But don't worry...the story has a happy ending...remember the dude was a member of the Christian Motorcycle Association because he had their grease rag, so he ended up riding his ghost-bike up to Heaven, so it's all good)...!
Step 1:
*the ride to the grave in The Motorcycle Hearse*
Step 2:
*the Stairway Highway to Heaven*
Step 3:
*insert heavenly chorus here for full effect*
Hmm. I can see it now...Ameratex expanding even further in the future and starting to sew that silky lining stuff that goes into caskets. And their company catch-phrase can be: Ameratex...from Cradle to Grave...
Man, I'm a marketing genius! They need to hire me! LOL!
Anyway, Jamie also found out yesterday that what Ameratex does for all of its employees during the week of Christmas and the first week of the New Year is to just give everyone a Temporary Layoff so that way everyone can enjoy the holidays by not having to work, but they'll still get paid (unemployment) for it. So that's pretty interesting. That means that Jamie will be off work from December 23rd through January 3rd -- a total of 16 days off in a row! (Including weekends). Jamie has a cousin, Ronnie, who works as a boat motor mechanic, and that's what his workplace does for him every year. Since Ronnie's work is kind of seasonal (nobody needs to have their boat motor worked on in the wintertime), his employer gives him a Temporary Layoff every year for several months (until the season picks back up) and it's time for him to go back to work. So that's pretty cool. I hope it doesn't mess with your unemployment benefits (I don't think it does, but I'm not totally sure). With the way Jamie is about getting and keeping jobs, the last thing we would need is for him not to be able to get unemployment when we need it, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be all right.
Anyway, changing the subject, I took Lilly to yet another doctor checkup yesterday to follow-up with how her ADHD medication is working. Remember the doctor started Lilly out on about the lowest dosage of 10 mg, and bumped her up to 18 mg when the 10 mg dosage wasn't working well enough anymore. I finally thought to ask the doctor just how high the dosage can even go on Lilly's medication, and she told me 72 mg! So it's good to know that we still have a ways to go (if needed). Lilly's doctor is very cautious and never wants to overmedicate with anything. I guess that's why ADHD has got a bad name, because people assume that a parent just doesn't like the way their kid acts, so the parent trucks their ill-behaved kid to the doctor, and the doctor immediately prescribes some high-powered drug that turns their kid into a zombie just to satisfy the parents...well, that's not the way it works.
Sure, kids can act up a lot. Sure, kids have a lot of energy. Sure, kids can get grouchy when they're tired, overstimulated, and/or hungry. But ADD and ADHD are real conditions. It's not just "hyperactivity". It's not caused by eating too much sugar or bad parenting skills. Just like a person that has diabetes, or MS, or AIDS, or cancer, or something like that wrong in their bodies, ADHD is also something that is wrong in your body. Just because it happens to do with your brain doesn't automatically make it something that you can secretly control just by changing your attitude or outlook on life, or by just thinking positively. That's something that has always bothered me (especially since I suffer from mental disorders myself, and it obviously runs in my mom's side of the family),is the stigma attached to it, and the general belief that "mental problems" aren't real, and that the people who claim to have "mental problems" could easily and instantly "cure" themselves if they'd only just change the way they think. Well, that's like saying that a person confined to a wheelchair who is permanently and irreversibly quadriplegic would be able to walk if only they'd believe in themselves.
And that kind of attitude that society takes with people who truly suffer from mental disorders ends up making them feel a trillion times worse.
It's like this comic:
If Physical Diseases Were Treated Like Mental Illness
Anyway, off of my mental illness soapbox, and back to Lilly's ADHD medication update.
The process of tweaking Lilly's medication dosage is a long, ongoing, tedious process. It takes a lot of work, baby-steps, and a lot of time to try to get it just right. Both me and Jamie and Lilly's teacher have had to fill out multiple forms many, many times already to gauge Lilly's behavior so we can see how the medication is helping or not.
The thing about ADHD medication is that it is to be taken first thing in the morning. This gets the kid through their school day, which is vitally important, because if a kid who has ADHD is not medicated, then they seriously won't be able to pay attention no matter what, and that will result in poor performance in school. So an unmedicated kid with ADHD would basically be set up to fail in life. (Another fact about ADHD: it's not something that kids "grow out" of. It's a real disorder that they have all their life long, and should probably always take medication for in order to be the most successful in life).
Anyway, by the time Lilly gets home from school at about 3:45, her medication has worn off, and she is starving and extremely grouchy. So she will act horrible and drive us insane all evening long until bedtime, no matter what we do. So Lilly's doctor is having us try something new. The doctor has prescribed Lilly 5 mg pills of her same medication for her to take just as soon as she gets home from school and has a snack. That way, she will be able to focus on getting her homework done, and it should hopefully be easier for us to get her to bathe, take care of her teeth, and get dressed. Because it's a major, knock-down-drag-out fight every single day to even do simple tasks such as that. It's ridiculous, and makes us all extremely miserable.
So hopefully this new 5 mg after-school pill will literally be just what the doctor ordered.
The doctor did also say that there is another, longer-acting ADHD medication, but that it is for kids who are older (like Junior-High age and above) that we might try with Lilly whenever she gets to that point. So that's good to know.
Lilly goes back for her next ADHD medication checkup on January 7th.
Fingers crossed (again)! :)
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