The hospital phone rang for a long time before anyone picked it up and when I asked to be transferred to my mom’s room there was a pause. “One moment please,” said a Voice, before transferring me to the Nurse’s Station. I thought this was odd. Mom had been at Holy Cross for observation after a fall and was due to be released to a rehab center that afternoon. The hospital had promised to give us a heads-up so we could be with her for the transfer, but they had not called and I wanted to see if Mom knew anything.
When I asked the nurse to connect me to Mom’s room there was another long pause and another Voice said, “I’m sorry, but your mother is gone.” Before I could respond she said, “We have her eyeglasses and her personal effects here. Please come pick them up.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean she is ‘gone’?” I asked, using a sharper tone than I intended.
“She was discharged about an hour ago,” said the Voice. I resisted the urge to reach through the phone, grab her by the throat and shake her senseless. “Where is she?” I asked. “I can’t release that information,” said the Voice, and hung up.
A quick series of calls to my 3 siblings revealed that none of us had been notified that mom had been discharged or where she had gone. Our stress levels surged with the knowledge that our 90 year old mom, wearing only a hospital gown and without her eyeglasses, was being transported to an unknown destination and was probably in a panic.
My siblings and I swept into action. My brother called the attending doctor, but he had been refusing to talk to us for a week, at one point sprinting down the hospital corridor with my sister in hot pursuit. I called hospital “guest relations” and got voice mail. My older sister called social services and also got voice mail. My middle sister called the nursing station and got another nurse who, improbably, was actually a) sympathetic and b) knowledgeable. “Your mother was taken to the Shady Oaks Rehab Center,” said the Nurse.
This resulted in another round of frantic calls and text messages, because Mom was supposed to have been transferred to Shady “Pines” not Shady “Oaks.”
A quick call to Shady Oaks revealed that Mom was not there. A subsequent call to Shady Pines revealed that Mom was not there either. By this time all four of us siblings had converged at my sister’s house to come to terms with the realization that the hospital had lost our mother. My younger brother, from Ocala, kept sending text messages. “WTF?” said one. “Where is she?” said another, as if we knew.
After we made another series of phone calls that were somewhat less frantic but considerably more belligerent, all of which resulted in dead-ends, my phone rang. It was Mom and she was not scared, she was angry. Very, very angry. “Do you know what they did to me?” she said, using a term you would not expect a 90 year old great-grandmother to use, as she told her story of being whisked away without being told where she was going or why. “They would not even let me call you,” she concluded.
My siblings and I made immediate plans to go to Shady Pines but first my brother had a drink. My older sister had a cigarette. My middle sister and I had a cheesecake. A week later I got a call from Guest Relations at Holy Cross. “You left a message,” said a Voice. “How may I help you?”