Most social work is a slog of soup kitchens, answering
phones, and pushing paper, but occasionally you find an interesting case that
you get all to yourself because everyone else ran screaming. Which are the best
kind.
Warning: medical trauma
I wouldn't have been in my office except that one of my
tougher cases, an illiterate registered sex offender with multiple felonies for
aggravated assault, needed my phone to complete a disability interview. Nice
guy, who would prove to be even nicer when things got ugly.
Because the light was on, strangers came knocking for
food, the last being Mister K, underfed as the rest except for one thing---he was mute.
"Come inside." I said, pointing to a chair,
"Can I help?"
Limping across the room, he gestured for a pen and scribbled
HOUSING in block letters.
My disability client turned. “I know him. He had a stroke.”
"What's up with your leg?" I asked.
He tapped the paper. "I understand you want housing,
but technically the office is closed and I'm more concerned about your
limp."
He peeled a sodden bandage onto the desk. The Stink is
something you don't learn in a classroom, that you need to experience in close
quarters. There is no better attrition for a freshman BSW class than making
them sit on a crowded Greyhound at 3am with forty men who purposely smear shit
on their clothes to ward off predators. When
the stink hit, the case manager three feet away covered her face and side-eyed
me like 'did you HAVE to look'.
My disability client looked up and said, "Man you gotta
show her, it's only gonna get worse."
"What happened to him?" I asked.
"He got shot. A month ago. And won't go to the hospital because he's got a warrant."
I have zero first aid training, unless you count minor grease
burns working at the Waffle House in high school. Digging out a first aid kit
and some donated Halloween skeleton gloves, I knelt and asked, "Mister K,
can you roll up your pant leg?"
The other case worker, hand still firmly clamped over her
face, called the street medicine team to see if anyone was in the area for
house calls.
It looked like a dog had bitten a chunk out of him, a hole
the size of two Ghirardelli chocolate squares stacked on top of each other
surrounded by infected flesh that was painful to the lightest touch, all the
way to the knee.
"You're gonna lose this leg," I said, gently
swabbing the area, "I'm impressed you don't have maggots, sleeping on the
ground like this. But yeah, the infection will only get worse."
A third case worker walked in at this time and chimed,
"Not just the leg buddy! You'll lose your hip, your eye, just you
wait!" and exited the other side with a cackle like a playground kid
shouting NOT IT.
Cleaning the wound, I had a couple of glorious minutes to
figure out next steps.
-He still had on an old wristband that had his name and date
of birth, which meant I could look him up in the database to see if there were
any scans of his driver's license (surprise, it was, along with a social
security and ID belonging to a completely different person).
-He claimed to have Medicaid and SSDI, which meant, if I
could get overnight at the indigent hospital, he might be fucked up enough to
qualify for a recuperative care bed.
Calls to various care providers confirmed that the best thing for him
was to appear at the nurse's station with a sign reading SEPTIC, INSURED, THE
QUIET TYPE.
-A little research confirmed he was a registered sex
offender, which wouldn't be a barrier for the medical stuff but would play
differently for housing down the line.
During this time, my disability client continued to bully
Mister K with stories of friends dying sick in every horrible way imaginable
(rotten teeth ranking high, since the infection can travel down and seal up
your airways), and we were beyond what Neosporin and whiskey could accomplish.
Peeling off my Jack Skellington gloves, I said, "I'm
going to type a letter of introduction for you to show the nurses. Maybe you
were doing something you shouldn't have when you were shot, but they don't know
that. I'll put that you're mute due to a stroke, can write simple words, have
insurance and income, and are at risk of sepsis. I'll drive you to the
hospital, and if you feel like that's not your scene, I'll toss in a bag of
Chef Boyardee and a bus pass."
Thankfully, he agreed. Three days later he was out and had the strength to land a piece of cake at the back of my head, so he must be feeling better.