Better Now

Not all bet­ter, but much bet­ter than I felt before, thanks to sam­bear.

I had my own un-miss­able appoint­ment this after­noon. It required going to a gov­ern­ment office that I’d rather have avoid­ed, but hey, we all have our bureau­cra­cies to bear.

There was a poor woman there who’d obvi­ous­ly been there a while when I arrived. She was try­ing valiant­ly to fill out paper­work to try to get some health care through the coun­ty’s sys­tems, but she was (in my total­ly non-pro­fes­sion­al opin­ion) in the throes of some seri­ous psy­chosis. She was talk­ing non-stop, with words and phras­es that bore absolute­ly no rela­tion to each oth­er. I mean, NONE. They were all Eng­lish words, but that was it.

The only excep­tion was that every few min­utes she repeat­ed some­thing like, “I can’t help it.”

Any­way, I peeked over her shoul­der at one time—she was putting some mark into every blank of the bluzil­lion-page forms, but they weren’t words. She was just mark­ing things, try­ing to do what some­one want­ed her to do.

I sat next to the woman for about an hour because there was­n’t any­where else to sit, and I was­n’t in any shape to stand—the place was REALLY crowded. 

After my appoint­ment, I came back through the wait­ing area and saw the woman stand­ing, still talk­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that put her “over” peo­ple on some of the bench­es, which was obvi­ous­ly uncom­fort­able for those peo­ple. They seemed to think that she was talk­ing to or about them, when in fact she was just con­tin­u­ing. She nev­er made eye con­tact with anyone—just talked.

I went off to file paper­work with yet anoth­er offi­cial, and when I came back through there was a sher­if­f’s deputy stand­ing a cou­ple of feet away from the woman. Appar­ent­ly, the deputy did­n’t see her as a threat, because the deputy was­n’t inter­act­ing with her at all. There was no oth­er rea­son for the deputy’s pres­ence, though, and it was a very pal­pa­ble “pres­ence.” You know, the kind you project when you want it damned obvi­ous that you are RIGHT THERE and the kids had best get on with what they’re sup­posed to do? 

Any­way — I’m glad the deputy was under­stand­ing. I fig­ure she might have head­ed off any confrontations.

But I’m still pissed off that a woman who very obvi­ous­ly needs pro­fes­sion­al care was sit­ting there like that with nobody even try­ing to help her. They want­ed their paper­work, which she could­n’t do, and weren’t offer­ing to help her fill it out or anything.

I was also sit­ting there think­ing, “Where is her FAMILY? Who the hell could let their daughter/mother/wife/sister/aunt/cousin wan­der around like that?” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I know that some peo­ple real­ly don’t have real fam­i­lies, and some fam­i­lies are so back­ward about men­tal health issues that they would­n’t have been much help anyway 🙁