Never Dull!
Occasionally returning
to work after some time off whether from illness in my case or for whatever reason causes us to take a moment's respite, we suddenly see the
world we work in a new way and sometimes with unusual possibly even surreal clarity
One of my favourite
residents in the hostel where I work (we don’t HAVE favourites of course, that
would be most unprofessional but on occasion certain perhaps cheeky clients
endear themselves for one reason or another, and we end up smiling inwardly at
pretty much everything they do!) . . . So this one guy disclosed he had been “banging
up Mandy in the leg” to which
our resident Nurse who is a wonderful antipodean lass who suffers no fools and
is about as down to earth as it’s possible to get, said
“OH NO! He can’t do THAT! Injecting someone else in the
groin is really dangerous and could leave him liable to arrest!”
She, unaware that
‘Mandy’ is the slang terms for MDMA in powder form so that folks can inject or snort it!
This
guy, who I will call Jack, has been injecting MDMA, Heroin and Crack into his
bad leg till it hospitalised him so he now injects into his groin where the
abscesses on his leg and groin have had to be treated with frightening regularity and in fairness he needs
to stop injecting into abscesses if he wishes to keep his leg but it looks unlikely.
He also says he is also daily
taking 4-5 Valium and 4-5 Rivitrol and drinking up to 8 cans of super-strength
lager each day. He does not consider any of this excessive.
He approached one
of the senior workers here with a proposition for a treatment option that I
hadn’t come across before. He
(seriously) maintained if we were to buy him the Lego ‘Millennium Falcon’ from
‘Star Wars’ the effort involved in his concentrating to make it would wean him
off the need to inject drugs!
In her last meeting with Jack my fellow staff
member noticed him gazing abstractedly at the embroidered logo upon his
baseball cap which read “Cocaine and Caviar” of all things and in a reflective moment he
suddenly observed “You know, I don’t really like fish!” as if that were the sole problem! (sorry!)
Jack duly turned up
later that same day to ask at the front desk to ask if they could give him some
toilet paper and he replied when questioned as to why he needed it
“Well I could
leave it but I have just shat meself in reception!”
Not that others of the
residents here aren’t similarly engaging from time to time. I am also especially
fond of a former photographer possibly even journalist perhaps of the punk era
and he is an engaging drunk who doesn’t SEEM to consume vast amounts but who’ s
behaviour of late had led us to take him to be medically examined as his memory
was getting really poor, only to be told he has early stages of Korsakoff’s
Syndrome or what we used to call ‘wet brain’, we will call him Billy, and he
had been observed earlier the same day saying he did not trust the look of the
windows. When quizzed as to why, he stated he did not recognise them and had
they been changed and they looked ‘foreign’ – there’s a degree of truth in this
in that several months ago now , it could have been last year come to think of
it, the entire sixty bed hostel had it’s windows replaced but he had only just
noticed! Either way Billy didn’t trust them!
One of the more
formidable clients there had made a scene when told his Keyworker wouldn’t take
him to see the Medical Centre for an appointment because he was too drunk, he
hurtled into the office as we were about to have a full staff meeting and
shouting at full voice he had
to go to the Doctor despite being drunk as he was suffering from “verbal
diarrhoea”!
“You don’t know
what it’s fucking like! I’ve shit my pants every day!”
I guess that’s a mixed metaphor or is it
an oxymoron?! Malapropism? Spoonerism perhaps?
On ‘room checks’ I had
been disturbed enough to report one of our female residents (room check is a
safety feature of the service and we accompany each other usually a male and a
female staff member but in this case we are two chaps and we know especially at
a female resident’s door to knock repeatedly and shout out we are coming in and
ask whether they are decent) having had no reply, we opened the door to be met
with the vision of this female client recumbent and masturbating on her bed. We
silently and discreetly shut the door and went on to the next room but I was
troubled, so I asked if I shouldn’t report it at least to her Keyworker to be
met with the response that it had happened before and that at least this time
she hadn’t been comforting herself during her menses as her hands had been
covered in blood!
By now it was time for
my lunch break yet for some reason I wasn’t especially hungry. I wandered outside where I found a
couple of our residents, one of whom is constantly on official watch for
domestic violence from her ‘boyfriend’, to discover they had both been drinking
quite heavily which is oddly unusual but it made the situation additionally
confused it seemed to me as the woman, who is what shall we say? - a big lass,
had both of her ample breasts sticking right out of her dress in broad
daylight which I cautioned she should not really be doing in public but they
both just threw back their heads and laughed at me and it was only later I
learned that they had to be warned in no uncertain terms about their possibly
being arrested for “anti-social behaviour” immediately outside the hostel front
door for ‘setting light to the
boyfriend’s pubic hair’!
On thing’s for sure –
it’s never dull!
. . . . . . . and no none of this is made up!
