Early in December of 2012, I was walking around Beverly Hills — window-shopping and carrying my son — when my phone rang. It was Dr. Wolf. She asked if I had time to talk and I apologized and said that I couldn’t because I had my hands full. I asked her if she could call again in ten minutes and she readily agreed. I rushed back to the car and then waited anxiously for her call.
The phone rang and we exchanged pleasantries. I told her how sorry I was that it took me several months to pay the balance in full and she told me she understood and it was not a problem. She said that she had gotten the results of the toxicology reports and they showed that mom, in fact, had no trace of Risperdal in her system.1 She said that mom did have abnormally high levels of Zoloft, though. Dr. Wolf said that the pulmonary embolism that killed mom originated in her legs and was almost certainly the result of prolonged periods of inactivity.
We discussed how frustrated I was that we were still waiting for Woodland Terrace to produce copies of mom’s medical records and Dr. Wolf said she would be interested to learn how frequently — or infrequently — mom was receiving physical therapy.
We were on the phone for about ten minutes and it was very painful to (once again) talk so clinically about mom.
1 I later learned that this doesn’t mean that she wasn’t being administered the drug while at Woodland Terrace. Because of the long delay between her death and when the autopsy was performed, any traces of Risperdal may have simply disappeared.