Lois Continued

On Saturday we called the PD of the island Lois lives on and found out the muddy encounter took place on 1/30. The PD put in another Driver Retest request with the state after responding to the muddy encounter. The timing is kind of amazing. If this had happened two days later, the police would have seen that her license was suspended in that moment. And it’s now confirmed that an icy road was not the cause of this accident.

The PD explained they could do a ‘social’ well check, during which they could let Lois know her license was suspended. We opted to wait until Sunday to ask for the well check to give us time to put resources into place for Lois: Uber, grocery delivery.

Yesterday the well check took place, and mid-afternoon we went back down. We had quite a wait as Lois had gone to a concert with her neighbor! We finally called her and this is how we found out she had been off enjoying music. We had 30-minutes. We went back into the house (and had been waiting in the car for the most part), finally found the extra car keys and went to work.

The car is missing it’s five biggest fuses, and there is a note in the fuse box, in a Ziplock, to ‘Any Mechanic’ briefly explaining why the car will not be repaired, and to call my DH. The car does not run.

Our conversation with Lois really could not have gone better. She thought the PD stopped by Saturday, not Sunday, and they had told her the car’s registration was not current. We tuned up her knowledge, knowing it would slip away, and talked about the fact she cannot drive. Interestingly she found the letters from the state with no trouble. “I think they’re in this pile. Things I need to deal with on Monday.” She found the first letter. I asked her what its date was. “November!” She said with astonishment, but no ire or anger. She said she’d get on it on Monday, today, rather than ‘tomorrow.’

Lois claims she will walk to the grocery, and doesn’t need to go anywhere too far afield for more than a month. Basically she turned down setting up grocery delivery and Uber. We chatted about this, trying to inject humor, for long enough that there’s a spark of hope she will call us with a grocery list! Or, far more likely, we will call her. It did snow today.

There are so many details and examples of her short term memory struggles. Too many to share all. A few that really stand out are:

• On Friday I helped her sort out her computer (Mac). She has been an Apple user for at least three decades, installing them at the college she worked at when computers became common tools provided by educational institutions. I’ve only been using the Apple computer platform for about 5-years. Anyways… I got the system showing her files by ‘last modified,’ assured her the computer was actually running on the latest operating system, and the Mac was indeed only a couple of years old. In the 2-minutes it took us to get downstairs, all of this was lost as she grumbled to my DH that the machine wasn’t behaving at all .
• I used to think the story she told us about the latest damage to her car was a ‘cover up.’ Now I know the ‘rocks at the grocery store’ are a line that’s comfortable, because she really doesn’t remember what happened to cause the latest ding.
• When she looked at the form from the state where her doctor said, ‘Lois needs to retest as she self admits to memory problems,’ Lois said, ‘Here’s where my doctor says everything is OK.’ So, not only did she not remember the conversation with her doc in December, but in the moment she was reviewing that form, yesterday, she didn’t read it accurately, or if she did, she instantly, instantly forgot what her doctor wrote.

Late this afternoon her insurance agent called me. We strategized. It turned out her insurance isn’t null and void just because her license is suspended. But it would be dropped immediately if they had to cover a loss under this situation. I assured him the car was inoperable. He was very supportive and kind.