June 22, 2011 – AMAZING THINGS ARE HAPPENING

I will be forever grateful to Karen Drew, Reporter, with the local Detroit NBC affiliate, WDIV-Channel 4.  She aired an AMAZING story tonight about my personal journey with Alzheimer’s and how I’m turning it into a movie bound for submission into Sundance Film Festival!

It’s incredible for me to see this vision that was born 4 years ago actually coming to life.  Amazing things happen when you speak your dreams.  Dreams DO come true!

Daddy-O would be SO PROUD!!!!!!!!  🙂

 

December 18, 2009 – ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

(REAL-TIME ENTRY)

My eyes are blurry with exhaustion as I type this.  As soon as I’m done, I’m heading to bed to pass out (at 5pm!).  WHAT a whirlwind 24 hours we’ve had!

First off, in order to give my mom some much-needed time and space for unplugging from the constant madness swirling around her, I sent her and Mary (one of her high school best friends who flew up from Florida to support us for a whole week) on a local 24-hour hotel/spa package getaway.  I hooked them up with top-of-the-line service and amenities and prayed that she’d be able to decompress some before Christmas hits next week and then we admit my dad into Sunrise Assisted Living the next week.

However, shortly after their arrival at the hotel as they were just beginning to settle in, the detective investigating our in-home robbery called my mom with the news that the two male punks who worked for us were now both in jail!  (Here she goes again getting sucked back into the harsh realities of her life…)  Following a lead that one of them had sold a huge batch of jewelry to a local pawn shop last month, the detective arrived at the pawn shop to interview the owner – and IN walked one of the guys with more jewelry to pawn!!!  BUSTED!  His roommate was sleeping in the car outside and they both were led away in cuffs!

The upsetting news (besides confirming that these boys had smiled and hugged us daily all the while robbing us under our noses!) was that ALL of our family jewelry was melted down!  The pawn shop owner waited the legal wait period of a mere nine days, then popped out the stones and melted down every last love token of my parents from their 50 years together.

To add insult to injury, the boys got barely ANYTHING for the exchange!  Honest to God, had they just ASKED us for money, I’m sure we would have given them more than that just from the good of our heart!  But, instead, they chose to do THIS TO US???  It makes you want to vomit.

Refusing to leave it there and wanting to warn other families about the potential pitfalls of allowing hired help into your home, I called WDIV (the Detroit NBC affiliate where I used to work as Associate Director) and offered them exclusive coverage of the story – and they said we’d be the lead story at six o’clock!  With my mom in a massage and unreachable, I raced and managed to get the news crew in my parents’ home to tape my interview and meet my father, all before she arrived back home!

(­Click here to watch the WDIV coverage of our story.  NOTE: then scroll down below the video screen, click on the box that reads “Search All Videos” and type Alzheimers, then change “Today” in the next box to “Last 30 Days”, and click on the photo of my parents with the caption “2 Men Accused Of Robbing Alzheimer’s Patient”)

The moment she walked through the door, I told her not to take her coat off – we had to go the police station right away to try to identify more jewelry and they were about to pounce upon the boys’ apartment.  So, with massage oil still in her hair, she and I raced off to the station while she tried to digest that we were going to be on the news in a few hours.  None of the seized jewelry was ours.  My mother requested a silent glare at the two boys behind bars but couldn’t be granted her wish.

Then we raced to Dad’s doctor’s appointment so that his chest X-ray and medical paperwork could get filled out in time for him to enter Sunrise on January 1!  I insisted the doctor also write a few prescriptions for my poor mother who is having the absolute worst week of her entire life and is hanging on by a thread with everything she’s got. 

Thank God for wine.  It really does help the world go ‘round some days.