So yesterday I finally tackled an issue that had been nagging me for a long time. And of course, before I even addressed said issue with the client, I had already figured out the solution, how the convo would play out, etc. See, I'm a genius.
Sigh. So much to learn young grasshopper.
Anyway, a client of mine basically moved an entire 3-bedroom house into a small 1-bedroom apartment...2 years ago. You see where this is going, yes? When I say that she has "tons of stuff", it is an understatement. In order to move around her apartment, she is constantly moving boxes (and those giant Tupperware type containers)...no really, she actually showed me how she gets around her place by shifting stuff around. I digress. Bottom line, I've known about the state of her apartment for a while but I let it slide...until I couldn't anymore because the EMT's couldn't get a gurney inside the front entry. Those pesky details.
So we scheduled a time to talk about what she could do. And as much as I thought that I was ready for her, oh boy was she ready for me. She said, "let me walk you through it"...and did she ever. She had answers for everything, and you know what? They were good, dammit! The reason she STOCKPILES canned food/dried goods/rice/pasta was that once when she had a stroke, she couldn't get to the store during recovery and she was scared it would happen again. Ok...I can see that fear. The reason she has enough clothes to outfit an entire homeless shelter is that she is incontinent and therefore needs "spares", and apparently lots of them. Alright...incontinence is no joke, I concede. I could go on, but its pointless - she pretty much had me beat.
Now don't you go thinking that I let her off without some changes. Noooo - that wouldn't be right either. But I have to say, they were relatively minor fixes. My favorite is that she will start to eat down her reserves - or will allow me to have a canned-goods drive right from her apartment. I think she could last several months in her pseudo bomb-shelter. Which I suppose was her plan. Anyway, she's going to make paths through the place so that she and her walker can actually move around unobstructed, and I suppose that is good enough for the time being. Baby steps, right?
Main point: never assume you know the whole story, let alone that you have all the answers. Then again, never assume you can't argue a perfectly reasonable point and win. Its all relative, isn't it?
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