Sunday, April 24, 2016

Never Turn Your Back on a Hateful Old Woman at an Assisted Living Facility


I'm pretty much exhausted at the moment and I'm doing some serious thinking about taking a nap.  This is the eleventh day that I've been taking care of my father, a period that began with an emergency room phone call, moved on to a hospital stay for testing, the insertion of a pacemaker, and four days of him recuperating at my home.  Sleep has been a catch-as-catch-can novelty for me during all of this, and there were only two or three times that I got more than three consecutive hours in.  

But this is what I want to tell you about.

I took Dad back to his assisted living facility a couple of days ago and stayed with him in his apartment there for three days.  There is no public wi-fi in the building, but they have a nice little computer room set up on the second floor that is open to residents and those staying with them on a temporary basis.  While dad was in a rare deep sleep, I decided to sneak upstairs for a few minutes to use one of the computers.  I went up and down the stairs every 15 minutes checking on my dad's sleep, but still managed to get in 90 solid minutes of computer time during which I wrote a review of Matt Gallagher's Youngblood (a new novel set in Iraq just before American troops were officially pulled from that country).  

One problem: I forgot to bring my flash drive upstairs with me, and that meant another trip downstairs.  As I was leaving, I mentioned to the elderly woman who was coming into the room that I was using the computer on the end of the row, and I asked her to keep an eye on it for me until I got back upstairs.  It took me an extra few minutes to remember where the drive was, but still I was back in the computer room in less than ten minutes.  

The old woman was nowhere in sight when I returned - and neither was my review.  Apparently, she sat right down at my computer and deleted the word document...then she proceeded to empty the recycle bin, leaving no trace of the document anywhere on the computer hard drive.  Then she disappeared.

The lesson here?  Never, never turn your back on spiteful old lady who thinks she is too old to be held accountable for her meanness.  The smartest thing she did was run for her life before I got back...she did us both a favor by doing that.

4 comments:

  1. What?! That's horrible. What would drive someone to do something so senseless and mean like that?

    I'm sorry.

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    1. Needless to say, I was devastated...for once, I was pleased with a second draft review and was done. But I've come to realize that she is most likely not in her right mind. My bad, I suppose.

      Heck, one old woman assaulted my father a couple of years back as he walked past her table by slamming her walker into his knees, almost knocking him down. She broke two bones in his knee and he has suffered the consequences ever since. She was booted out of the facility within a day because it was the second time she had struck someone...she tried to push over a couple of old women who were not moving fast enough on their walkers to suit her. (I know it sounds funny.)

      Hmmm...starting to see a pattern here involving crazy old women.

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  2. Poor Sam! She sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel!

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    1. She was back up there again this morning but I managed to contain myself and not say anything to her. Surprised myself.

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