Hi, I'm Sue O'Dell, Madison's mom. And I'm Madi. A typical
patient day, I mean, you wake up 6:30/7:00, depending on whether
or not you want to shower or not. There are two bathrooms on
the unit with showers, so if there are multiple girls who are
staying overnight, you kind of have to share and you get your
little time slot. But when you wake up, the nurse comes into
your room and takes your vitals, and then you do weight and
stuff. But after that, you're free to kind of do what you
please until it's breakfast time. So, shower, get ready, get
changed. Sometimes we would watch TV in the morning, just
depending on how long we had. And then food gets delivered and
so we all go to breakfast. I think it's around like, 8:00 in
the morning. We all sit down to breakfast, eat our breakfast and
then we head into the main room where there's this giant table
and it's really colorful, there's huge windows, and all
the patients kind of sit around the table and we go through our
morning routine. So it's a lot of checking in, how things went
over the night. We have this big workbook or packet that we get
to go through and we work on that during the morning time.
And then after that, we usually do some kind of a walk--so walk
around the hospital, go on a walk outside, if you're cleared
physically to do that, you get to go outside and kind of hang
out for a little bit. It's like, 10 minutes, but you get to get
off the unit; it's really nice. And then you come back and a lot
of the other patients who don't spend the night come onto the
unit. And so you have snack time and you have your first snack of
the day. And then we usually go into a group therapy session or
an individual therapy session. So you meet with your own
personal psychologist or you're meeting with different
counselors and are going through a nutritional workbook or you're
working on different things. It depends on the day. So we do
that, and then you go to lunch. So you go to the cafeteria and
eat some more. There's a lot of eating involved on the EDU.
[laughter] And then you split up into another group. You could
have a family therapy session, it really depends on the
patient. And sometimes, once a day, we get to go to the Ponzio
Creative Arts Therapy program. And so that'll be like, art
therapy, music therapy, movement and dance, or yoga therapy. And
so we have one of those a day. And it can be in the morning or
the afternoon, but usually it's in the afternoon. So we'll go to
that, which is just downstairs from the unit. And then after
that, you come back and some of the parents are in their own
class. And so they get out of their class and you might have a
family group therapy session where you do--each family gets
together and they make an art project to how they would
describe their family. Or you do a painting or you toss it around
and you talk about different things. It depends on, again,
what day it is and what you're doing. And after that, the
parents leave and they go down to the main hospital cafeteria.
And what's something different that not a lot of people know
about the EDU, is it's in a different building than the main
hospital. But they're all connected from underground
tunnels so you can get to each building pretty easily. So the
parents go down to the main cafeteria for dinner, and then
the patients kind of stay and wait around and get some small
things done, and then we head down to the cafeteria as well.
At dinner time, you can eat your meal with your family and kind
of hang out and chat. And after that, some of the patients leave
to go home if they're not spending the night. And then the
rest of the patients come back up to the unit where they can
kind of hang out with their family. And we used to watch
movies and chill out in my room a bunch of time. And then
parents leave and you have another snack and then just to
kind of be by yourself for a little while, and then it's bedtime.