One night, about three years before we moved into this old house, I admitted a patient with a very interesting story to the hospital telemetry unit in which I worked.  She was a frail little woman in her eighties, dehydrated and digoxin-toxic, meaning she had overdosed on her digoxin, not an uncommon diagnosis on our unit. We frequently admitted folks who couldn’t remember whether they’d taken their digoxin that morning, so they took another, and maybe repeated the sequence several days running.  The result being that their blood pressure bottomed out and they presented with extreme disorientation and confusion.  We were usually able to stabilize them and send them home in a few days, none of which made Thelma Burns’ story at all remarkable.  What did was that the EMTs who brought her in– they had been called by concerned neighbors– said she’d been living on her porch in a house up in Ormond-by-the-Sea, because the house was too full of junk to even walk through! She was apparently a hoarder.  One of the paramedics said, from what he could tell, the whole house was stacked floor to ceiling with books, magazines, newspapers, furniture, clothes, and all manner of odds and ends.  There was a small cot on the porch where they found her, but he didn’t know how she cooked and ate, or if she did.

She was fairly uncommunicative that first night, so I didn’t learn any more, I was off the next night, and when I returned she had been discharged.  Of all the hundreds of patients I treated, she and that little story are among the few I retain. It struck me as both sad and intriguing for some reason, maybe that she seemed so alone, and life had gotten away from her. But that’s not the end.

When we bought this house it had stood empty for more than a year, the realtor wasn’t really sure how long.  The owner was in a nursing home in Ft. Myers, and the sale was being handled by her POA brother, who wanted a quick sale.  When I saw the seller’s name, it rang a bell, but it wasn’t until after we’d moved in, in talking to a neighbor that I put the whole thing together.  The neighbor told me that when the prior owner moved out it took three days to remove and haul out all the junk inside the house.  Yeah, it was Thelma’s place.

The intrigue grew. When we moved in the walls of the rectangular flat-roofed addition on the south side of the house were lined with simple wood shelves on which were a number of fired clay pieces, pots, bowls, plates; and behind the house built into the slope of the dune was a small concrete block structure that appeared to have been a kiln! Thelma was apparently a potter.  And for several years we continued to get mail addressed to her from the Department of the Navy.  A navy potter.  The property records indicate there was only one owner prior to our purchase.  Thelma, or she and a husband perhaps, had built the place in 1949, and she lived here until the nineties, when she became my patient in Cardiac Care.  There’s a story in there somewhere, I can feel it.  I’ve started back-tracking through the records.  I’ll let you know.