Here’s an email I received from Janis Stovall of Grace Manor Port Orange. The footnote I added is the best part.
Hi David,
I am still with residents and would like to call you later this afternoon. My days can be pretty packed as you can imagine. Mom was pleasant, but I did not speak to her yesterday. It was the other resident sharing her room you were correct. 1
Regards,
Janis
1 Janis and I had a very long and confusing phone conversation in which she insisted that my mother seemed completely coherent and lucid and she didn’t really understand why I was so concerned. She also told me that my mother repeatedly asked her for a cigarette, or take let her go outside to smoke. My mother detested cigarettes and smoking with the intense seething passion of a hundred suns. I tried to argue with Janis that she simply had to have been talking to a different person, because there was no way my mother — no matter how delusional she may have been — would have been asking for a cigarette. And, of course, I was right. Janis visited my mother again and realized she had been interviewing a completely different person and not my mother.