Past tense, objective

Clinical notes are past tense, third person, no opinions, no interpretation. 'Client presented. Client reported. Client was observed.' I write them every day and they are correct and they are not the truth. I work as an occupational therapist in Galway, mostly with adults recovering from illness or injury, some with long-term conditions. The work is good and I chose it deliberately. What the notes don't contain is the particular quality of someone deciding, in a given session, to try something they've refused to try for three months. The moment before that, what it looks like from where I'm sitting. That goes somewhere else. The fiction I write is not about therapy or illness, mostly. It's set in the west, in the kind of small town I grew up in, in County Roscommon, and it concerns people trying to get themselves back to a version of normal they no longer entirely believe in. Recovery as a concept interests me because it presupposes a prior state. Often the prior state wasn't fine either. I'm trying to write characters who know that and have to proceed anyway. My current story, which is about three thousand words and growing, is set around an Easter Sunday that goes persistently wrong.