Tallulah's trials and tribulations with Assisted Living Facilities

Today I get a call from dear ol' mum, she talks about her favorite talk show host Bill Handle, how she's still having trouble turning on her TV and how the place she lives in is going to hell. My mom, the good Presbyterian woman she is, rarely uses the term hell so I listen carefully. It seems that my mother had a backed up toilet. I asked her for how long, she said two days.

TWO DAYS????!!! At this point my face is turning red...I'm 3000 miles away. Calming myself down, I call the front desk to verify that my mom had called the maintenance department to request assistance. The very nice receptionist says oh yes she's on the list. I tell her that my mom said it had been 2 days since she put in the request.

Silence fell, that kind of silence where they're carefully choosing their words as not to implicate themselves in anything or to indicate exactly how long my mother has been on this list. I tell the lovely woman (and she really is, I'm not being facetious), that some of the other residents suggested that my mom get a plunger as sometimes maintenance takes a while. The woman said, that's not a bad idea. I calmly, though I really wanted to jump through the phone line, calmly tell her that my mother has absolutely no strength to plunge a toilet on her own, someone needs to plunge her toilet immediately.

I call my mom and tell her that I've contacted the front desk and to call me when someone has plunged her toilet. One and one/half hours later, she calls to say they just plunged.

I ask you, if this is what we get at almost $5,000.00 a month, I wonder and am very concerned how bad it is at other places? Needless to say, I fear that very soon I will have to find new options for my mom.

So far the case of the backed up toilet is only one of 4 incidents (I know about) that have happened at Summerville since my mother moved in this past October 2006 (We're looking at only 2 1/2 month stay).

1. Nurses aide failed to help with clean up during a bad accident. (I was there, she was completely unbelievably unwilling to help)
2. Nurses aide failed to show up to take my mother to dinner
3. Somehow my mother lost her lunch seating last week which she ended up missing a meal.