Hi, I've been keeping up with texts as best I can, but between texts to me, texts to my mother's phone, facebook messages and every other means we have to bother each other in the digital age, it's getting to be a lot. I'm a fancy guy with his own website, so this is the next best thing. I'll update it whenever I can. If you don't see an update, there's nothing new going on...she's either asleep or watching MSNBC. Feel free to give this URL out to friends and family.
I'll also note that she's been extraordinarily ambivalent about even looking at the phone or ipad. Seeing as how both barely left her hand prior to this, I'm as surprised as you. I'm not really sure what that's about. I'd say don't bother calling for the moment, she literally just doesn't pay attention to it. My first job after I got to the hospital last week was to clean out her email (bouncing messages bc Spectrum is a dick) and VM (full bc she gets dozens of spam calls a day). I ask her every day "do you want me to call anyone so you can speak to them?" She always says no. Don't worry, I'm sure you're still special.
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The story so far (as of late October):
Pat fell and broke 3 ribs. She was in the hospital for a week, initially for pain management and then because her sodium was precipitously low. She was discharged to the same rehab facility my father was in and where he died (same exact room, in fact, but I didn't tell her that). After a few days of vomiting, she complained of chest pains and went back to the ER, where they discovered she was suddenly anemic. Eventually they figured out that she has a hiatal hernia, which was causing internal bleeding. There is a surgical option available for her, to fix the hernia but she doesn't seem interested. For now it's being treated with fancy antacids and taking her off the blood thinners. She was eventually discharged back to rehab. The plan is there for a couple weeks and then onto whereever is next, whether home or assisted living. She knows the choice is completely hers and that I support whatever she chooses, but I'm pushing for assisted living.
2026.12 Friday:
Just wanted to reiterate and answer some questions I keep getting:
-She is home.
-Her home phone, the number most of you have been using for years, is working.
-Her cell phone is still locked because of too many bad password attempts.
-I cannot unlock it from NYC.
-She told me she didn't lock it, so let's say the gremlins locked it.
-She still has an ipad.
-You can text her on her ipad.
-She cannot seem to ingest the information that all the numbers that were in her phone are also in her ipad, so if you feel like texting her your number, go right ahead. I've instructed her and shown her how to get to phone numbers in her ipad, she's not understanding it.
-It's my feeling that she's failing cognitively, but unfortunately she is still with it enough that I can't make decisions for her. Her taking opiates for pain is not helping, I'm trying to get her off them, you can imagine how she feels about that.
-She needs to go to assisted living, she is not safe living alone and 24/7 home care is not something she can afford long term. I also cannot keep dealing with all this unceasing chaos from afar long term.
-I live in NY, and I have a full time career.
-She is committed to living in CT.
-As you might expect, that means I am incredibly busy and unable to be involved in every detail of her every day. It also means that I do not have unlimited time to run up there every time something happens.
-So if you're asking me why I'm not there, that's why.
-For those of you who aren't aware of have forgotten, she is from New York, where I live.
-She moved to CT to be near her mother, who died not long after she moved there.
-I work on Broadway.
-There is no Broadway in CT, thus I will continue to live in NY for the forseeable future.
-She knows this.
-I need everyone to respect that I am incredibly stressed out about all this 24/7, and pestering me about why I'm not there will not relieve this stress, it will simply cause me to stop responding to you.
I think I've got all the bases covered. Happy new year to all who celebrate.
2026.1.1 Thursday:
Happy new year to everyone! She arrived home to her phone not working, so one of her friends heroically got the phone company out there within hours, on New Year's Eve. As of around dinnertime last night, her home phone is working. It sounds like her cell phone is both locked and dead, so I'm not sure what I'll do about it. The goal was to have a watch for fall alerts - which required an iphone, but with having an aide 24/7 and her all but having to go to assisted living, I'm not sure she'll be alone at night again.
Feel free to give her a call. The new aide's name is Tina if she answers the phone.
2025.12.30 Tueday:
The good news is Pat is home, as of this morning. The bad news is that she fell again last night at the facility, for the second time. Despite that, they let her go today.
She has a 24/7 live-in aide for the time being. I'm going to get her settled, let the new year pass by, and then really push her to move to assisted living. I didn't have any confidence she'd be safe at home, and that's proven true after last night's fall, which occurred in a room full of trained professionals. She's still her own person and is still the most stubborn human being alive, so the fight to get her somewhere safe will require more than just me. I'd love for all of you to help me encourage her to move somewhere safe. She's committed to staying where she is, so I will remain over a hundred miles away for most of the time.
After many sleepless nights and a lot of squabbling, she has a hospital bed in the house. Her old bed was too high and too squishy for her now, as she is.
I asked her to plug her home phone back in, she said she would. Her cell phone is still locked for the time being, until i have time to get up there.
2025.12.27 Saturday:
Hope everyone is having a happy and safe and healthy holiday season. Pat is scheduled to go home in a couple of days, with 24/7 live-in home help, as well as with some visits from nurses and PT and whatnot. Just as a reminder her mail is still going to my house in NY, so I have your cards and all the nice stuff you've all been sending, and she doesn't. I'll bring them up the next time I see her, have no fear.
I just wanted to thank everyone who has been so instrumental in doing things that I can't be up there to do, food shopping, getting the house ready, just doing all the stuff. I can't thank you enough! She thanks you too, even if some of you have been bearing the brunt of her moods and frustration.
As far as communication, her cell phone is still locked, her iPad still works (for now, I guess,perhaps it's only a matter of time). When she goes home her old home number will once again be active...I unplugged her phone because she gets an absolutely ungodly number of spam calls every day, they jam up her answering machine, and the phone announces the calls in a nightmarish robo-voice I just couldn't take anymore.
2025.12.19 Friday:
Hey all, so I just need to say a couple things. First, thank you all for visiting and keeping me up to date with everything that’s happening, I can’t say enough how much I appreciate you all. It’s the only thing allowing me to sleep at night.
But it’s important to know a few things about how my mother is and how she’s doing. First, as you may or may not have noticed, she’s anxious and she’s controlling. She’s got a lot of time to just sit in the rehab center and go over details in her mind. The problem is she’s been having some cognitive difficulties and losing track of who she’s telling what. As a result, I’ve now had three different people text me that she asked them to do various things at the house over the past couple days...which is great, she has a community of amazing folks who are happy to help. The problem is she’s asked you all to do the same things. She’s not keeping track of these things very well.
So please just text me to find out if you’re about to waste your time. The pipes aren’t going to freeze, I left just enough heat on. The thermostats are fine where they are. Please don’t touch light switches, everything works with her Amazon Alexa stuff. I left the house clean and tossed food that could spoil or seemed like it wouldn’t last. Please don’t give her any plants, she can’t take care of the ones she already has.
I know she locked her phone, but if she needs phone numbers, they’re in her iPad. I know she likes to say that I’m no help, but I call regularly and she knows all this stuff. The mail comes to my house and I’m paying her bills.
Again, I really appreciate you all and I can't thank you enough, I just don’t want people wasting their time.
2025.12.15 Monday:
Had a phone meeting with social work and PT today, her new discharge date is somewhere between 12.23 and 12.29. There's a few elements that still need handling, for instance we can't get a hospital bed in there until she has a discharge date, and the discharge date is dependent on them speaking with her. This timing is a nightmare as far as getting her care team going, but I think she's pretty well maxed out on what Medicare will provide.
PT's assessment is that she should have 24/7 care in place upon her return to home. Ideally for me she'd go to assisted living, but what I want doesn't seem to matter much. I think she's strong enough but she's not as mentally with it as she had been in the past. In speaking with my aunt Carol Ann, she gave me a phrase I can use as a starting point for further research: mild cognitive impairment. It seems to fit pretty neatly with what she's got going on. In the meantime I've asked her friends to nudge her in the direction of assisted living whenever possible. She wants to stay up there, and I sure as hell can't live there, there's only one Broadway and it's not in Tolland County.
At some point she locked her iPhone with too many bad password attempts, so now I'm just paying Verizon for the privilege of spammers being able to leave voicemails she can't pick up. She has a direct landline number for a phone that sits on her nightstand, I'm not going to put it here but text me and I'll send it over. She also has her iPad which she hasn't yet managed to lock, you can still text her.
So, not the greatest news but it is what it is and she and I will move forward as best we can.
11.11.25 Tuesday:
Today we had the meeting with the social worker and her PT lead. They both felt like she's making good progress. She still very much wants to go home, which I don't think is the best idea, but if she's adamant and the folks at the center think she can manage with some help at home, I can't force her not to. We discussed adding more problem solving to her OT so she can manage complex tasks more effectively now that she's much more limited.
She seems to have stabilized generally. Her blood numbers are far better, which means the meds to suppress the reflux which caused the bleeding seem to be working. In the short term she is still off her blood thinners but I'd imagine long term the best idea would be to get her back on them once again, knowing as we do her history with strokes and heart attack.
The projected date for her to bounce out of there is 12.9. We'll see if that actually happens. Before I returned to NYC I disassembled her bed in anticipation of a hospital bed going in there...her regular bed was so high I had trouble even sitting on it. I was hoping to make some more accommodations like rearranging her bedroom so the bed is on the shared wall with the bathroom (meaning a shorter walk) but as you all know she is very controlling, very stubborn, and very resistant to change, so she was resistant to all of that.
I'm now back in NY with an extended show run through January with one day off, so she's on her own for a while. To her friends reading this, you all have been amazing and I couldn't do any of this without you. I don't know that she's gone more than a day or two without at least one visitor and I know many days she's tired from all the people stopping by.
2025.11.24 Monday:
After 2.5 straight weeks of work I finally have a couple days off, so here I am. My mother seems better, a little more with it. Definitely more argumentative, which makes the 3.5 hour drive in traffic feel even more worthwhile. Her hemoglobin counts are improved, her heart function is not.
She's still weird with the phone. I asked if she wanted me to call a number of you and put her on the phone, she said no. She says texting is an issue because of her sight, but she was texting fine before the fall so I have some feelings about how true that is.
We have a meeting tomorrow with her case manager, and I'm not sure whether this is a progress report or for discharge planning. I don't feel like it's safe for her to go home, many of her friends agree, so we'll see what happens then. After that I am working shows every day until January, so I have to go back to NYC. The show must go on, and for the holidays that becomes even more true - everyone wants to watch football on Thanksgiving weekend and go to shows during xmas, and that means my friends and I work all those days.
2025.11.07 Friday:
Yesterday was a travel and wrapping up day for me. My mother spent the day resting and getting some PT. If you visit, it's very important to let her do things for herself...feeding, reaching for things. If she wants any measure of independence, she needs to struggle and build up strength. I called her and watched her answer the phone yesterday, but for whatever reason it seemed to take a lot of effort. If you do call, please keep your messages short. She's getting dozens of spam calls a day, and every one of them leaves a long message. Her voicemail will fill up quickly.
However she's doing, she's certainly doing better than the dementia-addled pedophile-in-chief who, during a press conference in the Oval Office yesterday stood at his desk and shit himself while staring off into space after a man passed out and most everyone else in the room rushed to help.
2025.11.05 Wednesday:
2pm: She's all settled in and was eating some lunch when I left. She's not happy with her new room or roommate, and handled it with her usual shining attitude and sparkling wit. I have more laundry to do and desperately need a nap. Text me if you'd like to pay her a visit and I'll give you her room number or you can ask at the desk.
10am: Pat is now out of the hospital and on her way back to rehab. If you're planning on visiting, just a reminder that she will have a new room assignment, so check in at the front desk. Before we left we sat together for a little while and I asked why she seemed to have an aversion to her phone and iPad. Other than the fact that she's having trouble seeing, she didn't have a good answer. I went through a list of people and asked me if she wanted me to call most of who'll be viewing this page, she said no. So, I tried. Best I can do. If you're annoyed, just imagine being her son who lives 130 miles away and who will have no way of being in touch with her.
Also, holy cow am I proud of my city for rejecting yet another sexual predator and the billionaires and electing an actual man of the people!
2025.11.04 Tuesday:
Pat is currently in the hospital. On Sunday at the rehab facility she reported chest pains, was taken to the ER and found to have hemoglobin counts low enough that they gave her a couple units of blood. This morning she was given a third. The current working theory is that she has a hiatal hernia which is causing reflux, which has in turn caused bleeding in her esophagus. They're working on keeping it controlled via medication to keep her as comfortable as possible. If you're local you can visit her, but be warned she's very tired...she was up all night Sunday (I was there for 7 hours, it was hectic til midnight) and has been on a liquid diet since.
If all goes according to plan, she'll be discharged back to rehab tomorrow. Her room assignment there will change, so if you'd visited her previously you might be surprised to find a totally different person when you now walk in the room. The front desk will have her new room assignment.
You've reached the end of the updates. Still hungry for some Gallagher goodness? Here's some of my past work:
