-- and it goes by the name of Service Users' Apartments.

...

*At a loss for words*

... God.

No, really. Oh. My. God.

"He's not been doing anything for himself," said the Social Worker, as he showed the district nurse and myself into a new patient's apartment. I guess he meant to forearm us but nothing could have prepared me, innocent second-year nursing student that I was, for what I was going to find.

We walk inside and look around. The minute we do, I'm half-inclined to bolt out of the door again. I was expecting chaos: I was not expecting piles (and I use this word both advisedly and completely literally) of food wrappers, old magazines and newspapers and empty takeaway cartons. I was not expecting the stool used as an ashtray. I was not expecting cigarette fug, the soiled mattress, the pile of clothes in the corner that, I suppose, must have served as the individual in question's 'wardrobe'. I was not expecting my shoes to stick to the floor, as if I were leaving the cinema after attending a crowded children's matinee. The kitchen was so squalid it made Withnail's kitchen look like Nigella bloody Lawson's. Instead of bolting I carry on in, find somewhere to stand and school a polite, professionally disinterested smile onto my face.

(I'm a student nurse. God help me.)

I knew, after two and a half weeks on this placement, that some of our patients lived in squalid conditions but I never thought I'd see someone living, and doing so seemingly quite contentedly, in what basically amounted to a small, housebound version of a landfill site. I'm quite deeply disturbed. How the hell could anybody let somewhere they lived get into that state? I bet, she said obviously, that room was alive with vermin. I couldn't believe it then and I still can't believe it now. Needless to say, after about fifteen minutes, I start to feel pretty damn ill. Unbelievably, the place didn't actually smell all that bad, but even so there was a definite fetor about the place.

Oddly enough, there wasn't a lot we could do for the guy. As for the room, the only thing to do with it would be to move the service user out and start over somewhere else. That room, in that condition, was pretty much irredeemable. If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, I suppose the place might start to look passable again. My instinct, however, was to wade in with a shovel. Or, failing that, break out the napalm.

I'm going to bed.