On The Edge

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Many of you know if you read the blog often enough and every day is not often enough, that we have a mental health unit here at The Institute where we treat any and all who come weeping or wailing, or in a murderous rage, or the frustrated, or the halt and the lame, or the paranoid, lying, cheating, addle-pated terminally nutso citizens that frequent the grounds. And if you didn’t know that now, now you do.

Normally we have a full staff of defrocked Psychologists, Psychiatrists and psyche strikers or what we call wannabes to handle the surprisingly large number of patients that show up on our doorstep. But it seems that we are short of them at the moment. All we have on hand is a slightly strange shrink that just happens to be undergoing his weekly shock treatments so he is MIA just when we need him the most. This is the time of change, a time when if there are going to be any problems they will appear. In fact it will rain problems and the deluge will be biblical. And with it becoming Fall and all, what with migrations taking place, worries about the winter’s food supply for the layovers, and that ever present topic of outright desertion by ones mate who just flew off in the middle of the night, the clinic is full to overflowing. We’ve had to resort to deckside therapy as we can’t squeeze one more patient inside.

When the main shrink is here he would normally handle this patient but due to the fact that he is often discombobulated, and doesn’t know whether he walked to work or wound his watch for several weeks after each treatment, it falls on The Director to step in and assume some of his duties. Thus The Director was up at bat when this Canyon wren flew in and began a core dump of every problem she had ever had, real or imaginary, and that her life was a living hell and what were we going to do about it.

We have had experience with this young wren before and always found her to be excitable and quick to assume the worst even when the worst was happening. In fact there were marital problems in her relationships with the various male wrens she associated with before and she was seen by our resident clinician who said ” Nope, She’s just nuts. Can’t do much with her.” Her behavior was documented in the following post http://www.bigshotsnow.com/late-for-dinner/  way back in May of 2013. It seems her tolerance level has not improved since then.

But as is usually the case, letting her squeak and screech in her shrill little voice, and flutter her wings until she had it all out there was helpful. The main problem was that her mate had left early on the migration, simply saying he’d see her down there, which was the root of her angst as she didn’t know where down there was. Fortunately our case worker had been talking to the male wren who stated he just needed some quiet time and left a note for our patient saying where down there was. After finding that out and taking about a million ‘ludes to calm her down she went back and started packing to leave. Wouldn’t it be great if all problems were solved that easy.