The Visit

    The neighborhood was non descript. Old Navy housing akin to row houses, each one a duplicate of the next. Trees lined the streets and a gentle breeze fluffed the leaves this way and that. Margaret spotted #57 and parked as close as she could. She had learned long ago not to park to close - better to arrive with an aura of surprise. She knocked on the door and stood waiting for a reply. She was always quite pleased if there was no answer ; jotting a note on the back of her business card with a date and time asking the person to call her. No such luck today as an unexpectedly handsome young man answered the door. He was tall with dark hair and eyes. 
    “Hello. I’m Margaret Reede from Anders County Adult Protective Services. I’m here to see Terry Holdenner.”
    “Sure, she’s upstairs,” he said with an Hispanic accent.
    Immediately inside the front door, the stairs looked steep. They curved around to the right. Straight ahead she noticed a mass of furniture piled onto itself in no particular order; simply a heap of chairs, tables, bed frames and a mattress or two leaning against the heap.   Inwardly, she shuttered and heaved a deep breath.
As she climbed the stairs, she saw the kitchen - equally disastrous, stacks of dirty dishes in the sink and not one square inch of space on the counter tops. Margaret made mental 
note of everything she saw, heard and smelled. Everything had to be documented for her report.
    Terry was sitting up in bed, asleep. There was an empty french fry container from 
McDonald’s at the end of bed along with a package of Duncan Hines soft chew chocolate chip cookies opened and partially full and what appeared to be some sort of white stocking flung on the bed.   The Hispanic man woke Terry.
    “Wake up, there’s someone here to see you.”
    Terry woke up and looked at Margaret with a blank expression on her face. 
    “Sorry to wake you, but I’m Margaret Reede from Anders County Adult Protective Services. We’ve had a referral concerning your health and well-being.Someone is 
concerned about you.”
    Kill ‘em with kindness was always Margaret’s motto along with the catching more bees with honey ditty. This Terry woman looked very familiar to Margaret and during the course of the interview, she came to realized that she had met Terri before - some years earlier. Terry was 10 years younger than Margaret but looked 20 years older. She looked inflated.Her face was round, puffy and red, her eyes so small and shiny, that Margaret wondered if she was high. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a long while. There was that familiar sour odor obese folks often had. Margaret’s stomach turned. Terry’s leg, which was jetting out from underneath the blankets was badly swollen, and her skin looked so shiny and tight Margaret felt it was about to burst. She had no discernable ankles to speak of. Terri’s stomach looked huge and gave the appearance of someone in the later stages of pregnancy. Margaret estimated Terry to be in the 250 to 300 pound range. How did she ever negotiate those stairs, Margaret wondered.
    The room was shock full of junk. There wasn’t a free inch of space anywhere. There was a large dark wooded bureau to the left of the bed that took up one entire wall. There was hardly enough room for Terry to get by. On top of the bureau were empty VHS containers, miscellaneous junk and no less that 20 or 30 bottles of prescription medications. The opposite wall was stacked high with boxes and clothes.
    “We just moved in here, “ Terry said. “I haven’t had time to get organized. My doctor told me I had to stay off my feet. My diabetes is out of control and my doctor told 
me I will die if I don’t loose some weight. You know my 18 year old is schizophrenic and the younger one is failing in school.”
    No wonder, Margaret thought.
    She conducted her interview professionally; asking about Terry’s doctor, when she last visited him and when her next appointment was. The allegations were that Santiago, Terry’s boyfriend, was not caring for her properly, but Terry vehemently denied these allegations.
    “See these stockings, here?” Terry pointed to the white stocking at the end of the bed. “The doctor told me to wear them to help with the swelling in my legs, but I can’t even get them on.” 
    Margaret felt such empathy for this woman. She was so young and her health was desperately poor. 
    “If I come back with a nurse to show you how to wear the hosiery do you think that would help you?” Sure.
    Arrangements were made for Margaret to return at the end of the week with a Public Health Nurse.
    About 3 days later, Margaret found a newspaper article face down on her desk, She turned it over. It read: “Obituaries. Terry Holdenner 1958 - 2004. There was a photo of a lovely woman. It looked like no one Margaret had ever seen.

                                                            By Linda Brenner