The Card Game...........More Nursing Home Drama

07-02-2012 at 08:04 PM 

It seemed like the old routine “Who’s on first, what’s on second” by Abbott and Costello. I wanted to pull my hair out!

It all began when I went to “the home” on Sunday afternoon. I went by myself as I had promised the last time I was there with my kids. I knew if I had brought my kids I would not have had time to visit with my grandmother. My expectations were to have a nice quiet visit with her. Only seconds after walking in through the double doors leading into the wing I was greeted with, “Honey, can you take me home?” said in a very determined and demanding voice. I followed the voice and recognized the desperate plea coming from my own grandmother who was sitting in front of the receptionist desk right by the exit doors to the wing. After I approached her she recognized that I was her visitor and her granddaughter. “Oh Cher, hi honey. Will you take me home?” It was then that I realized she had asked a stranger to take her home. It’s a fact that she did not know whom I was when I first walked in and probably couldn’t see me until I got in her face.

She was suddenly ‘one of them’ in my mind. The other residents say things like that to strangers, not my grandmother. In my humble opinion she was always the sane person in the wing. She was always astounded by the behavior of the others’ in her wing and seemed to respond as one who didn’t belong in there.

I followed through with my plan to take her out of the wing and into the lobby of the home where she could feel like she was escaping from the prison walls of the Alzheimer’s wing. I asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee knowing full well that she loves her coffee but was disappointed when she said, “no”.

“You don’t want a cup of hot coffee?”
“No. Who’s gonna make it?”
“I will.”
“Ok then. I will have a cup of coffee.”

I transferred her into her wheel chair and handed her a box that contained a deck of cards. We proceeded to walk the long halls of the home to get to the main lobby. Our first stop was the ice cream parlor where I found an ice cream bar for her to eat. The next step was a table near a bar that had juices, tea, and hot coffee. When we arrived at the table I asked her for the deck of cards. “I don’t have them,” she said. I checked around her chair but they weren’t there.

“Well, I handed them to you.”
“I didn’t bring them.”
“Ok, I am going to go back to see if you dropped them along the way. I’ll be right back.”

I began my long journey through the long hallways and back to her wing. I took the extra several steps to the front of her wing but there were no cards. When I got back to my grandmother I saw her examining the box that contained the deck of cards. She had them the entire time. Never mind.

The next thing I did was got her cup of coffee and myself a cup of tea, broke out the cards and asked her what she wanted to play. Poker. If there was one thing I was sure of that was that my grandmother knew how to play cards. Growing up she taught her grandchildren how to play blackjack and she played the game of poker with her friends every week. I think her last poker game was shortly before she moved out of her condominium about 10 years ago. I remember growing up my grandparents frequented Las Vegas and were treated as VIP’s. I remember them coming home with presents for my brothers and me. It was an exiting time to go to the airport to pick them up. I dealt the cards. Five-card poker threes is wild. The first hand she threw a card down and I gave her a new one. The thought going through my head was, “yeah, here we go. Something my grandmother knows how to do and I am sure she will enjoy.” It was my turn to discard and replace. I was ready to put my cards down as the dealer to expose my hand and my grandmother put a card face down in front of her and said, “I need a card.”

And here we go………..

“You already discarded and now you have to lay your hand down.”
“No I didn’t. I need a new card. Come on.”
“Ok, but how do I know it’s not the card I just gave you?” I gave her a new card.
I lay my hand on the table, a pair of sevens.
She lay her cards down on the table one…at…a…time. “I have a full house.” A ten, jack, queen, king… And, that was it!
“You can’t lay 4 cards down. This is five-card poker. You need five cards to get a full house.”

I dealt the next hand. I reminded her what was wild but this time she wanted it to be a 5. I waited for her to go through her cards. She appeared for a split second to be totally normal and totally in her element with cards in her hand until she started to discard again. She laid one card faced down in front of her. I gave her a card then discarded my cards and dealt myself some new cards. The she discarded another card and expected me to deal her a card. I reminded her she had to do it all at the same time. I lay my cards down. I had a full house this time. My grandmother laid her cards down one… at… a… time. She had three aces, three of a kind. I asked her what beats what. She said as though she was sitting at a table with Veteran poker players, “a full house beats three of a kind.” That she remembers! The next few hands I walked her through it and then decided to play blackjack. I knew everything I knew about blackjack from when she taught me as a child. I was sure she would remember how to play. I dealt two cards out to each of us and she didn’t know what to do with them. I had to remind her how to play. The roles were reversed until we played a few hands and it seemed to all come back to her. Teaching my grandmother how to play poker and blackjack is like trying to teach a retired fisherman how to bait his hook. It’s something you never expect for them to forget because they had so much practice doing it.

Once we got the game going she didn’t want to stop and wanted to keep playing but our visit was cut short because it was getting close to dinnertime and people were starting to come into the dining room and would eventually want to sit in our borrowed seats. We headed back to her wing, with a coffee to go, and into her dining room.

I said goodbye and she did everything she could to keep me from leaving. I told her I would be back.