Do you ever find yourself disoriented when you try to leave someone’s house you have never been in before?  I find myself in this situation pretty often in my daily work.  I go from house to house providing physical therapy services.  And no, I am not literally walking to adjacent houses and working my way down one side of a street.  

“Hey, I couldn’t help, but notice when I was at your neighbor’s house that you were waddling up your driveway.  Lucky for you, I’m a physical therapist.”

“You were watching me walk?”  

“Yep.  It’s both a blessing and a curse.  I constantly analyze the gait of pretty much everyone I see walking.  It’s one of my primary protocols.”

Full disclaimer, the houses are all over the place and there is no solicitation of services on neighborhood sidewalks.  Every time I initiate a conversation with a nearby resident, I make sure I have written permission from the patient to be able to mention my relationship to that person in the above scenario.  Also, this scenario has never actually happened and no HIPAA laws were broken.  Don’t come at me, Bro.

Here is a common and realistic scenario.  And I don’t mean Common.  Just want to put that out there in case anyone is confused.  I have never met him so I don’t want to make any assumptions on the type of scenarios he Commonly deals with or if they share anything in Common with those in my life.  Getting commons confused is a Common problem.  Can we move on?  I was trying to move on.  You guys keep looking at this paragraph.

It is not uncommon (sorry) for me to find myself in the following situation.  I have a new patient and go to visit them for the first time at their house.  Hopefully, if the information is accurate regarding their address, my GPS doesn’t have an attitude, and common sense (sorry) prevails, I will reach their house without difficulty.  

Being an anxiety-riddled introvert, it is important for me to perseverate on how the upcoming encounter will play out.  I load my most commonly (sorry) used jokes for they are the crutches on which I bear partial weight.  (PT reference, ✓)  At this point, I have to decide my choice of ingress.  Front, back, side, garage, window, basement, upstairs, underground drug lord tunnel, Dr. Strange portal thing.  Since my focus is on the patient and potential other people inside the home and how things are about to go down, I am not paying attention to the labyrinth I am being led through to reach the patient somewhere in the structure.  

It can be like playing Doom or Zelda where it can become nearly impossible to find your way if you don’t have a full map.  And unlike Zelda, I have yet to find a chest in someone’s house that contains such a map.  And unlike those games, it is frowned upon to try every door in the house until I finally locate the proper one.

Door 1: Closet

Door 2: Bedroom

Door 3: Bathroom, family member on toilet

Door 4: Laundry Room

Door 5: Bedroom, full of killer dogs

Door 6: Closet

Door 7: Exit, yay!

When the visit is all said and done, I am suddenly faced with a horrifying revelation.  I have no idea how I got to where the patient is and I don’t remember which way I came.  It’s like, and I do apologize for bringing this up, Matrix Reloaded when Neo is in that hallway with a bunch of doors and they all look the same.  But in my scenario, I don’t have a keymaker dude to show me the way.  But also to be fair, I don’t have Hugo Weaving and his clone army trying to kill me.  Keanu Reeves, he is the Common link.  They were in one of those Johnny Candlewick movies together, remember?  

I look around at each of the doors.  I look at the windows hoping for a landmark to orient myself to the layout.  The view tells me nothing because it is a side yard and I don’t know which side.  The doors all look the same and there are no observable differences.  My choices are to pick a door and go for it or admit I don’t know where to go and ask for help.  I prefer neither option, but life forces me to choose.  It’s like trying to pick a side in Captain America: Civil War.  If only there was an expression to use when you are in a situation with two options and it is really difficult to choose between them.

One time I tried to draw the outline of a door and the knob with chalk like they did in Beetlejuice. That failed spectacularly and drew several odd looks from the patient and their caregiver.

What about getting lost before arriving at the house?  Oh, yes, I know it all too well.  GPS is an amazing technology, but it is not perfect.  And it is not an idiot-proof system.  Sometimes the address or street just doesn’t show up at all.  I find this to be the most helpful of all potential complications.  Sarcasm detected.  From there, I have to rely on one of two strategies.  One, use a website that is meant for public records of land ownership to find the missing address.  Or two, call and ask the patient to give me directions.  You may be asking yourself, that seems easy, why not do that?  Don’t tell me what to do.  I already have a 5 year old that takes care of that.  

The thing is, some of these folks give the worst directions.  Some just tell me to come down a certain road after coming through town where I am supposed to make a right turn, yet they don’t actually know which direction I am coming from so their instructions are dependent on me traveling a specific way that they cannot be sure is happening.  That sentence was concise.  Or I get the version of directions that involves landmarks that I am not familiar with or references to the things like “turn right after you pass Elmer Smith’s old barn”.  I know neither Elmer Smith, nor his barn.  Some clearer references would be a lot cooler.

I really like going into an unfamiliar subdivision where all the houses are basically the same few models and the street names have the same base word with the only difference being the final word.  I understand “road” and “street”.  Those are legit choices.  But a part of the subdivision that has 10 adjacent houses on each side of the street and is surrounded by a corn field is NOT a boulevard or avenue, not a parkway or a terrace, and certainly not a plaza.  I am no lexiconagrapheristerist.  I don’t know much about dictionary word things, but there must be at least a thousand words to choose from for the first part of a road’s name.  Maybe even more.  

Once I get to the center of one of these subdivision mazes, I can’t seem to find my way out.  My GPS starts auto-rotating the map screen as if it is having a grand mal seizure.  Finally, it commands something not particularly helpful like “go north”.  Frankly, I don’t know where I am anymore.  Am I still on this planet?  I can’t see any major road for the forest of brick houses.  I have no idea which way is north.  Inevitably, I try to decide which direction of the map the blue line is alerting me to and which way that could be in real life.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I start going one way and the GPS starts yelling about how wrong I am and gives me a completely new course that is usually several minutes further than the original one.  How can it tell me how to get from Indiana to Argentina, but can’t tell me which way is north in the middle of a subdivision?

By the way, about 2 days ago I found out there is a compass direction shown on the corner of my car’s display screen.  Well, I guess that’s all the complaining I have to share for now.  Maybe we will see each other soon, if I can find my way.