…”Patient frequently confused. Two falls this year. Wanders at night. Unable to manage finances. Family requests long-term placement. Patient unaware of decision; please handle intake discreetly.”
I read it in my car in the restaurant parking lot. Twice.
I’m sixty-five. I’ve owned a flower shop downtown for thirty-one years. I have six employees. I did my own taxes last month. I haven’t fallen since I was nine years old and tripped over my brother’s bike.
My son, Daniel, had signed the form as my “power of attorney.” He isn’t. He never has been.
I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning, I called my doctor and asked for a full physical and a cognitive evaluation, “for my records.” She saw me that afternoon. Every test, I passed. She wrote a letter stating I was “in excellent physical and cognitive health” and “fully capable of independent living.” Then, when I explained why I needed it, she wrote a second letter. To the nursing facility.
I drove to the facility myself the next day. Brookside Gardens. Very nice. Fountains. I walked up to the front desk and asked to speak to the admissions director.
“I believe you have a registration form for me,” I said, and handed her my driver’s license, my doctor’s letter and the folded brochure.
She read everything. Her face changed. She closed her office door and spent the next hour going through Daniel’s application with me. It included a doctor’s note confirming my “decline.” The doctor’s name was one I’d never heard of. When the director called the doctor’s office, they had no record of me.
“Ma’am,” she said, “we’re required to report this. I’m calling Adult Protective Services.”
I let her.
An APS caseworker came to my house a week later. She was thorough and kind. She talked to me, to my doctor, to my employees, to my neighbors. Then she talked to Daniel and his wife, Kristen.
It turned out Kristen had found a “doctor” online who wrote the note for two hundred dollars. The plan was to get me admitted, sell my flower shop as “my caretakers,” and move into my house. Daniel had gone along with it. He said Kristen had convinced him I was “slipping” and didn’t know it.
“Mom, I thought I was helping,” he said, when he finally came to see me.
“You wrote that I wander at night,” I said. “You’ve never once been at my house at night.”
He didn’t have an answer.
The fake doctor was reported to the state. Kristen and Daniel weren’t charged, because the admission never happened. But APS opened a file, and I made sure my lawyer had a copy. I signed a real power of attorney. For my business partner, Rosa, who has known me for twenty years.
My grandson, Tyler, who slipped me the brochure, comes to the flower shop every Saturday now. He’s eleven. He’s very good at ribbon.
For my sixty-sixth birthday, I took myself and Rosa to the same restaurant. I ordered champagne. Rosa raised her glass and said, “To Margaret. Who will be living in her own house, running her own shop, for a very long time.”
Everyone at the next table clapped. They didn’t even know why.
