This afternoon at 3:43PM PDT I called Woodland Terrace in another attempt to talk to mom. Someone named Marty answered and I asked to speak to Kathie Gagne, in room 207 on the West wing. Marty asked if I knew if she was in the window bed or the hallway bed, and I said I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter because she doesn’t have a phone in her room and needs help to talk on the phone. Marty acknowledged and transferred me to the nurses station.

Nurse Dawn answered and, after I explained who I was and who I was trying to reach, she asked for my phone number and told me she’d call me from mom’s room. I said okay and hung up the phone.

At 3:51PM my phone started ringing. I managed to answer by the third ring, but I just heard a voice say the word “work” and then the line went dead. A minute later the phone rang again and I answered immediately. It was Dawn, and she said that there was no phone in mom’s room and that the portable phone’s signal didn’t reach that far. I told her that mom had been there over two weeks now and I’d only been able to talk to her one time and I was starting to get frustrated.

Dawn asked me when the last time was that I had been there to visit mom. I told her that I lived in Los Angeles, and that I had last seen mom around Mother’s Day when I was there for almost a week. I told her how she had been at Coastal Rehab then, and how when I got back to LA there was a voice mail telling me that they had rushed her to the ER at Halifax and she’d been there until two weeks ago when she was transferred to Woodland Terrace.

She said that mom wasn’t “cognizant” of her surroundings. She told me, “we’re keeping her on the floor on mats, because she keeps trying to get out of her bed. She’s mostly curled up in the corner on mats on the floor all the time.” She said that when they put her in a wheelchair, she, “flops on the floor like a fish.” Nurse Dawn said she was sorry to have to tell me that, and she knew it was probably rough to hear, but she wanted to make sure I was aware of mom’s “condition”.

“Okay,” I said. “Now let me tell you how she got to be there,” and I began the twenty-minute, long version of mom’s history.

I got about five minutes into it — I was just telling her about mom going into an increasingly worse depression after the bank foreclosed on her house in Gainesville and she was forced to move into an apartment in Port Orange — when Dawn said, “David, I’ve got a resident seizing. Let me call you back.”