Wow. I don't know what to do with this.
First, a little background... Before I started working, I received services from a home health care agency. The agency would send a CNA for two hours every weekday to help me with lunch, personal care, and household chores. A few years ago, for quite a stretch of time, I actually had the same CNA for every day of the week, which was pretty uncommon. We'll call her "Sue".
Right off the bat, Sue was excited to have a client who was fairly young in a field where most of the clients are elderly. She was also eager to share with me that she was disabled too - she was bipolar. Okay, well I could deal with that. I'm completely compassionate toward people with all sorts of mental disorders... in fact, I've attracted them all my life.
We became fast friends. Because of our relationship being more than aide-client, we sometimes bent agency rules. We'd go out to lunch on a nice day, even though for insurance reasons the aides are not supposed to drive clients around. Sometimes we'd even go shopping together when I was her last client for the day. She'd bring me to her house and I'd help her with her computer. Even though her personality sometimes drove me crazy, it was nice to have someone to spend time with and get out of the house with. Yes, I realize now that this was probably a mistake, and opened me up for what happened next. Hindsight is 20/20.
On Halloween of that year, when Sue arrived at my apartment, she came in talking a mile a minute, something about a tree she had never seen before that she almost hit on the way in. I was only half listening and didn't think too much of it, since she babbled often and a lot of it didn't make sense. But then the next words she said to me were, "Carly, I'm so drunk!" Yeah. Just like that. Like she was proud of it. I was her only client that day, so she had gone over to her ex's house that morning, and the two of them spent the morning emptying a full bottle of brandy. Then she got in her car and drove to my apartment - her job.
As soon as she had sobered up and gone home, I called the agency and told them what happened. I haven't seen her since that day, although Chris had several sightings of her and her middle finger throughout the year or so that followed. Then he stopped seeing her, and stopped seeing her son at school, so we assumed they had moved away.
Today, Chris received a phone call neither of us ever expected. Sue had tracked him down at work by calling the main switchboard and asking for the computer department, then asking for "Chris Matthews". She's apparently desperate for someone to fix her computer, and we were the only people she could think of. She said nothing to him about the events of that Halloween, only that she hasn't seen me in years and she misses me. In fact, she told Chris the last time she saw me was the day we had lunch at Applebee's and she decided to celebrate my birthday two months early and had the restaurant staff sing to me. That was in May... five months before the actual last time she saw me. Does she really not remember what happened? Did something happen to her in the past few years that caused her to lose some of her memory? Has she blocked it out? I honestly don't know.
If we were going to have a relationship again, I would need for her to know just what she did to me that day. She took advantage of my friendship in thinking she could show up to work drunk and get away with it because we were friends. While it's true that I had covered for her with other less serious transgressions, I still needed the services that she was paid to provide. She couldn't even make a sandwich that day, much less anything else. I placed my safety and well-being in her hands, my trust in her, and she violated that trust. I would need for her to take responsibility for her actions, to recognize that she lost her job all on her own, not because I "got her fired". That's something she obviously didn't recognize during the time she was driving around flipping Chris the bird every time she saw him. But is her sudden change of heart now an indication that she sees things differently, or does she really have no memory of the entire incident? If, and only if, she took that responsibility and made an apology, I might be willing to start over again.
But do I really want to do that? Besides being a magnet for the mentally ill, another shortcoming of mine is that I sometimes tend to be too forgiving, I think. Does she deserve another chance, even if she does apologize? With no ill will intended toward those people in my life with mental disabilities, the fact that I attract so many of them introduces a lot of this type of drama into my life. Would I be opening myself up to more of that by letting her back in?
![[photo of me]](/glasses144.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/flood2010/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
![[album thumbnail]](/photos/oregon2009/thumbnails/albumthumb.jpg)
