I've had my share of hoarders over the years in home care nursing. There are hoarders like my mom, who boxes large amounts of old tupperware and that kind of crap in the basement and cannot get rid of a bill statement so her room has piles of paper on surfaces. But things are clean, organized in her head only, she is clean and it has not spread throughout the house, makes periodic efforts to get "really organized and get rid of stuff". She is totally aware she has a problem. There are a lot of people like this once you get in behind closed doors.
And then there are some like this: living in a flat, abject poverty, not enough money for food, slumlord landlord- literally no front door, anyone can walk in and easily break in the particle board doors. Very ill, morbidly obese woman who gets seen twice a day to change the gangrenous wound dressing on the half of a foot she has left. It's like bushwhacking to find her, newspapers up to the ceiling, garbage as well, humongous collections strewn on top of the papers, filthy porcelain dolls falling off the stacks of papers that are taller then me, garage sale toys everywhere, rotting plates of food, bags of garbage the rats have eaten through. As you try to get to the back of the apt, her S.O. is freaking out that you will cause the towers to tumble, you climb over piles of filthy utter crap, bugs, mice, rats scurry. And she literally lives in the bathtub, she eats in there, sleeps in there, moves her bowels and urinates in there, so obese she is naked because the S.O. cannot find a nightgown big enough. She is so wedged in there, I cannot even turn her to bathe her backside. You do the wound care after taking a pile of dolls out of the tub so you can find her feet. And you think surely this person will die soon from some infection or massive wounds on her back side from lying in shit 24 hrs a day. Nope.
And then I see her house on the news, major fire, amazingly not from her apt. She tells me she was screaming so the firemen would know she was in there. I have no clue how the heck they got her out of that tub. She and s.o. get placed in very small studio apt at the homeless shelter. They are distraught to have lost everything they owned. Neither is mentally stable. But I'm so glad she is out of there even if it puts her in crisis because she can be cleaned, she's been in that bathtub over a year, her hair had not been washed in that year. Somehow we find ginormous nightgowns, she is in a hospital bed, they have MOWs, SNAP, etc. You'd think this is all good. It's not, all of her beloved things are just gone and she is too ill to go out to garage sales to start all over. He's distraught that they are in the city and his vehicle won't make it to the 'burbs for garage sales. He ends up kicked out of the shelter housing (I think he was an untreated paranoid schizophrenic but I'm just a nurse) for fighting other residents, drinking and drugging. She never sees him again. Now she is stuck in a hospital bed with no one to take care of her. She ends up in the county home, I'd visit, she was broken hearted. Those firemen risked their lives to save her, she is in a "better" place but without psychiatric help, to her, she has nothing. Jesus Christ, there are meds that work for hoarders/OCD. But try finding a Medicaid mental health provider willing to make house calls. Does not happen. And this is the result. I asked at the home if a therapist or anyone had addressed her mental illness, "she's fine". Yup, just fine. And as for being funny? You tell me