Confidentiality

I think most people haven't got a clue about confidentiality. We used to have an Archbishop who thought that everything could be called 'confidential'.
He used to label his monthly letter to clergy "Confidential"; one of these contained the number of monks and nuns in the Anglican Communion. So, I have never revealed that piece of information to anyone, and will go to my death bed before I betray that confidence.
Today the third S Clark went to one of our chatty GPs (he drives us to distraction with hius endless chatter, just give us drugs and let us go!). Any way he starts chatting to Ms S abotu her particular issue and then starts talking about a particular family who he saw once abotu a certain issue...half way through the conversation S realises that the particular family he is alluding to is us!
Stupid goose.
It's all well and good to be 'hypothetcial' and 'confidential' but in a small town like this people can put two and two together.
Doctors (and Archbishops) should do better!

Resilience

I told one lot of people I was interviewing last night that I had already been told to $@*& Off! once today already.

To be fair the chap was off his tree. G. Declares himself to be a brilliant mathematician (as he has done on a number of previous occasions) and then carries on about some circumstance where he is worried about someone else having an accident. "Four people died that way last year!"

When I at least tried to invite him to make some statistical analysis of that (seemed like a reasonable thing to ask a 'brilliant mathematician' to do), and also reflect on the fact that he was trying to seriously impede someone else's freedom (something he is not to keen on for himself)...well it was then that he stormed off and said the choice words.

It sort of shakes you, particularly that there are some people who you just can't (and won't ever) reach.

Contrast that with another visitor I had last week, a woman who camped for two nights on our property.  And who was also not well-balanced. Someone referred to her as a 'tramp', and I suppose in the 20s and 30s that is how she would have been pigeonholed. 

She did not particularly need me or anyone else to converse with as she was capable of having very animated conversation with herself.

My role in this situation? Just to try and be normal, I sort of think of myself as fixing a peg in order that a person who is floating may be able to grab on if even for a little while. Sometimes it is hard work, and it was with this woman. But there was a certain good humour about it.

She said things like...I like to sleep on church ground because the wicked men can't get me here. They attack a single woman.  

There was a sense of awful pain in her past.

 Then she didn't think it was better to sleep in the church, rather than outside. That wouldn't be right...She was happy to stay as long as you don't call the doctors or the police...I assured her there was no need to do this. Though there was a temptation to think that maybe this would be the short-circuit to dealing with this situation

Any way there many things...and I was happy to try and present a safe haven for just a couple of days.

She was not dissimilar in the degree of disorientation to G and there was an edge that indicated that things could go pear-shaped. As it turned out she came and went, left a note thanking me for letting her use the church (which is normally open). 

She made choices about where she would live, and they were not what most 'doctors and police' would think should be done (hence her reluctance to deal with them I suspect), but really her life worked quite well.

I was drawn to thinking that it was sort of like the aboriginal people who chose to camp outside rather than live in some Housing Trust accommodation. Her life worked well, though not what authority figures (doctors, police and clergy) might suggest.

There are lots of people like this around.

Medical science

 I have been saying for some time that the difference between being in your 50s rather than your 40s is that you go to the Dr and you don't expect to be cured.  You are "managed" in your decline.I am in the middle of such a process. My haemoglobin levels are slowly declining and the cause is not immediately apparent.
Good on Dr Dave for persisting with me every six weeks or so for 30 mins (I was the first appointment and made him run late so early in the day). There are spectres that loom. Veiled references in conversation....if we don't find anything, don't imagine there is anything sinister (he said)....but then he doesn't say anything more and there is a sense that you feel he chose not to. Nothing sinister though.