The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

“We ought to call a Family Council meeting. Four families asking together is a different animal than one daughter with a complaint.”

We called it for that same afternoon, four of us plus two more families Carla rounded up by phone, six households in all, and the director of nursing, a woman named Ms. Pruett, agreed to sit down with us in the small meeting room off the dining hall because she did not have a graceful way to say no to six families asking at once.

Ms. Pruett came in with a legal pad and the particular smoothness of a woman who has sat through a hundred of these meetings and learned to let complaints roll past her like weather. She started with what I now recognize as the standard script. Short staffed industry wide. Doing everything they could. Appreciated our patience.

“I don’t have a complaint about staffing in general,” I told her. “I have a question about my mother’s call button being moved out of her reach for three days, and I have five other families in this room who have their own version of the same question, and none of us came here with a lawyer. We came here because we want to know you’re going to walk every hall in this building yourself and look, the way we’ve been looking for three days, before one more night goes by.”

I watched that land on her differently than the complaint script usually lands. Six people nodding is harder to file away than one.

“I’ll walk it tonight,” she said.

She did. I know because I was still there, in the recliner, when she came through at nine that evening with a clipboard of her own, and I watched her check my mother’s cord, and Lois’s, and move down the hall room by room, and I watched her face change somewhere around 108, where Phil Ketcham’s father’s cord was, again, tucked under the edge of his mattress where an aide moving fast would never have to hear it jingle against the rail.

She found Brandy at the nurses’ station a little after ten, going over the overnight chart, and I was in the hallway getting ice for my mother’s water pitcher, close enough to hear more of it than I think either of them wanted a family member to hear.