I called Woodland Terrace to see if I could get an update from Nurse Luanne since I hadn’t heard from her in over an hour. A woman named Marty answered the phone. I told her that I had talked to Nurse Luanne in the West wing about an hour ago and wanted to know if I could speak to her. Marty said that she needed to check to see where Luanne was. Marty returned and told me that Luanne was in the West wing and asked me to hold.
A few seconds later the line was answered by someone named Angelique. I asked for Nurse Luanne and she said she’d get her and put me on hold again. (I couldn’t tell if there was some sort of interference on the line or if I was listening to something they were intentionally piping into the hold music, but it sounded exactly like Rush Limbaugh talking about something from very far away, with lots of interruptions by static.)
Luanne answered and I said who I was and she told me that she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Dr. Peele yet. She wanted to let me know that she had spoken to “the social worker” about getting mom psychological therapy and she was going to call me. (I asked her if she was referring to Shelly Sparace and she said that she didn’t know her last last name; she only knows her as Shelly. I can’t imagine there are multiple social workers named Shelly employed there, though.) She repeated that Shelly was going to be calling me, because she didn’t know anything about psychological counseling or what her facility offers in regards to that, and she didn’t want to give me any wrong information.
I told her that I certainly appreciated that, because wrong information sucks, and we both laughed. Nurse Luanne was very, very nice.
I asked her how my mom was doing, if she was still very anxious. She told me that she was waiting for Dr. Peele to return her call about the Xanax and that right now mom is laying down. She said she didn’t know how long mom would be down, that sometimes she’ll go down for a half hour and other times she’ll stay down for several hours. Nurse Luanne said that mom was exhausted from walking up and down the halls and standing up and sitting down repeatedly, so she is very calm.
I asked Luanne if she was from Boston, because she has a very distinct accent. She laughed and said she was from Massachusetts and then we talked for a minute about how mom was born in Providence and how I was born in Pawtucket and spent several summers in college loading trucks in Seekonk, which is right near where Luanne’s hometown.
She told me that this was her first day with my mom and she’s trying to get her patients settled. She again told me that Shelly would be calling me and I thanked her and we hung up.
The entire call lasted about six minutes.