Some of you know that one of my closest friends is also one of my work colleagues. I've known her for just over two years now, but I probably know her much better than some of her primary school friends.

We had only worked together for a few months when she decided to tell me (after some, in retrospect, strangely coincidental conversations and comments) that she has a very severe case of OCD and anxiety.

I was the second person she had told about it, wilfully. The first person she told was her best friend, who then proceeded to expose her to the very things she feared, and then forced her to talk to a doctor. This resulted in my friend, T, trying to commit suicide, being commited, and then placed under the very watchful (and intruding) eye of state health, while having to attend weekly sessions with a psychologist with the threat of being institutionalised if she didn't attend.

I don't know how T expected me to respond to her confession, but I doubt it was what she recieved. Having already known a lot about OCD (I don't wish to discuss why at this point) I was slightly fascinated with her predicament, but it didn't bother me in the slightest (why should it?). The only things I ever interfered with were things that she did that hurt herself, otherwise, it wasn't my place to change her. I let her talk when she wanted to talk and probably made her talk when she didn't want to, too, but she has said that I am the only person she doesn't feel weird talking to about it.

So anyway, fast forward a year, and she is having money and car problems. Our boss's wife, being a bank manager, decides she's going to help T with her finances, and goes through her bank statements with her. She questions her on some recurring transactions which T eventually tells her are for medication and psychologist appointments, and then makes her promise to not tell her husband (T's boss). She promises, and that seems to be the end of it.

Last week, another co worker seems to go a little a-wol, and finally tells our boss that she has been on anti-anxiety medication for many years, and that she has just changed to some new ones, and they seem to be affecting her moods.

On a night shift, when it is just T and our boss, he suddenly starts talking about the other co worker, and about medication and disorders etc. (you have to understand here that our work and boss is not like a normal work situation - he is not the normal boss-type and so everyone knows everyone else's business at work - it is a friendly situation to begin with).

T thinks this is all just a little too close to home so decides to divert the conversation to safer ground, but our boss will have none of it, eventually saying that he has guessed T is on some type of medication, and that he believes she has anxiety and some other thing, 'it can't be schizophrenia so I'm guessing it's some type of OCD'.

T tries to find out how he knew, he says he just picked up things here and there.
(I think personally that his wife told him but told him not to tell T that she told him - so he tried to figure out a way to tell T he knew without incriminating his wife).

So, my problem is, that I KNOW that he knows that I know - even though T says that she didn't tell him I know. And this makes for an awkward situation at work.

*sigh*