Julian F. (The smoker who shouldn’t).

Julian was one of my first “patients”. He was (is) sixty-three years old and suffers from multiple disorders including emphysema and diabetes. His “Nurse” Norlee told me he had cogitative disorder and therefore was in need of constant, on-going reminders to take care of him self and do what he was supposed to do, which she tried to transfer to me with this off hand comment.

Julian lives in the East Avenue Trailer Park off Linden Avenue in Pittsford which, I’m sure, makes the residents of the rather high end town of Pittsford just a little tight around the collar, with his ninety year old mother, Edna and his two brothers, Amil (who looks like Paul Newman with cancer) and Larry, who’s about forty but doesn’t seem to work, not that there’s anything wrong with that. When I first met Amyl I said to him, “Ah, named after a famous nitrate” and received my first “trout look” in several years, causing me to resist trifling with Amyl. There are also two daughters who come frequently to take Mom to the doctors and perform most of the bookkeeping/bill paying and shopping duties necessary to keep this trailer full of folks in OK medical shape, and fed. They had lived in this location for over thirty years and as a result this forty feet of living space was jammed with various collectables gathered and filed along their ways of live into what had to be four of five hundred square feet of space. On the Health Plan it said, “Pick up and keep the place clean” and during the several weeks I went there I tried to find a place to start, BUT to no avail.

Julian looks like Henry Lee Lucas, the alleged serial killer from Texas, and he spends most all his days smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and looking out the window across the vast expanse of the East Avenue Trailer Park while complaining about the pathetic state of the medical communities inability to understand his problems and the miserable financial situation he’s found himself in for, basically, not having worked much during his life as a result of one or another medical “situation”.

Mostly I made his bed, encouraged him to take a shower, and tried to make sure he applied some “magic” suave to the back of his right leg (upon an ulcer or five) in the hopes that these diabetes induced problem areas would clear up.

I went to see Julian twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, for two hours a pop, for the first four weeks I worked for Rural Metro. I was relieved, finally, by a new student who lived in the area.

I can only hope for the best for Julian, but I don’t even know what that is. God forbid I ever find my self in similar circumstances I don’t know what I’d do.