meg1230

I send out notes to family a few times a week reporting on mom...this is the latest.
________________________________________ __________________

Her apartment is cleaned every Friday afternoon.
I noticed, though, that it has been not looking too spiffy lately. (more on this later)

We had an incident this week...her medicine was mailed out and should have been mailed to her nurse because Jim has tried twice to change the address from mom to her nurse's office...but to no avail.
She has always gotten the meds and taken it directly to her nurse ..like a good little girl. * )

But this week we kept waiting and no meds show up so we ask mom if she received any...Uh nope, she was sure of it!!
In the meantime, we ran out, but her nurse had extra on hand, luckily.

Now a week overdue, I decide to politely ransack mom's place. I spent over an hour going through the place...in drawers, under the bed, along the way cleaning out crap. It really was a mess ..and so dusty! Ick. After a while I found the smoking gun. The envelope it all came in. I asked mom about it...she didn't know nothin'. That was her story and she was stickin' to it.
I searched some more and found the label that was attached to the meds explaining what the meds were, how to use them, etc, etc. Still no memory that she had received it...and still no meds to be found..we search some more...finally I find it. Tucked behind the coffee pot, which she doesn't use anymore, since she can't remember how to make it, and a few large containers of Splenda that she swipes from every where we go and a basket of wooden fruit. It was just dumb luck that I finally found it. Picture a box of 30 condoms. That was it...her Exelon patches for the treatment of Alzs. (not that it is working)
The box had been torn open but luckily all 30 patches were there.
I was mad the whole time I was searching because of the idiot mail order place..I knew eventually she would get meds in the mail and something like this would happen.
But the good news of that day was all the crap I got out of there.

Back to the original reason for this e mail. It was reported to me yesterday that mom has not been letting Nellie, her cleaning girl, clean...especially her bedroom...so, I thought I would just show up when Nellie got there and escort mom out under the pretenses of taking a drive to the beach. On my way up I run into Nellie...She is a sweet girl of Latin descent with a thick accent, but understandable...
So I see her , she sees me and runs to me with her hands extended in prayer...saying to me..
"Oh don't be mad at me!! She won't let me clean! I beg her. I say, OH PLEASE let me clean but she say, NO!"

I tried to calm her down and tell her I understood....but she continued...by now I am torn somewhere between pity for this poor girl and laughter at mom holding off the cleaning girl.

She continues...

"OHhhhh....I try. I get the feather duster and try to run fast in her bedroom and she follow me and she take the feather duster away and she SIT on it and say, NO!!!!
What I do??? I call Emma (the head of housekeeping) and say, Ohhh, she sitting on feather duster again and her daughter going to be mad at me.
So Emma tell me to clean the bathroom..she let me do that. So I clean the bathroom and when she no looking I run in her bedroom and dust with a towel and she catch me EVERYTIME!
What I'm gonna do?"

By now I'm about to pee in my pants laughing, picturing mom sitting on the feather duster.

I finally calm poor Nellie down and we walk to mom's apartment...We go in and Nellie says...
"And she no let me change her sheets either!"
Okay....
I send Nellie to the bathroom to begin..went into mom's bedroom and told mom I was going to strip the bed so Nellie can clean the bedroom. I do some preliminary stuff and tell mom to get her purse that we're gonna take a drive to the beach..she says, OK. No fuss, no fight...we take off...I start to close the door behind me and see Nellie, with hands in prayer, saying..."Oh thank you!!". I smiled and off we went.

We get back an hour later and we go up and Nellie was still there..but no problem...I showed mom her beautiful clean bedroom and got her out of there again so Nellie could finish and walked her down to dinner. She calls me after dinner to tell me how clean her apartment was..."Why, Nellie did such a good job!", she says. I wanted to say, yeah, because you weren't sitting on the darn feather duster!

Two notes...
This was Nellie's last day...darn...she has finished her schooling as a heath aide and will be working at a hospital. Mom will get a new cleaning girl....poor thing...(the cleaner, not mom!)

And secondly, Mom said on the phone that my son and his wife did a really good job of cleaning out all that junk yesterday. (rolling my eyes)
I must have been home eating bon bons and reading movie magazines!


Love, Meg