Knowing when to turn off the ignition

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/02/2017 (3245 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An elderly woman I will call “Dorothy” had been trying to reach me repeatedly at the office when I was away early in the year.

She was looking for help.

When we first spoke over the phone last week, Dorothy didn’t directly mention what kind of help she needed. She took a back road to get there.

“I’ve driven my car for 38 years,” she began. “No accidents. No tickets. Nothing.”

There were occasions over those years, she recalled, when she ventured as far as Grand Forks and Fargo.

“My car used to be called a taxi. I filled it up with people and away we went. And then, as I started getting older, I started, you know, not going that far.”

She is 82 now.

Eventually, Dorothy would confine her driving world to her Transcona neighbourhood and to visiting people and places that mattered most to her.

Church every Sunday, for one, being the constant destination.

And then, after church on Aug. 14, she tripped in her living room and fell on her knees. One of them had been replaced more than four years earlier, and Dorothy was concerned she might have damaged it.

She called one of her two daughters — the one who drives — and ended up at the St. Boniface Hospital emergency room.

“I’ve been crying ever since,” Dorothy said.

Not because of the knee. The real problem — the reason she reached out to the Free Press — was the notice she received in the mail some time after her release. Her driver’s licence was being suspended, subject to review.

“For what?” she said indignantly. “Just falling in my living room?”

With that, Dorothy turned to where her life literally began going off the road, during those few days she was in the hospital. She remembers pushing her walker, and a female staff member approached her with a request. She wanted to ask Dorothy some questions.

“She asked me silly questions. Well, I thought they were silly, anyway.”

Her other daughter — the one who doesn’t drive — sat in on the interview. Dorothy recalled having just been given some pain medication and giggling, at times, during the process.

“We’re talking backward and saying things forwards. I guess that must have been a road test. But why? I didn’t need it. I didn’t go there for a road test. I went there to have my knee fixed if it was broken. But it wasn’t. So why would they take my licence away?”

I suggested it was probably a cognitive test and there must have been concern that she doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to drive safely anymore.

“No,” Dorothy insisted.

“I’ve been driving for 38 years. I was always a careful driver. And I didn’t even go to the city. The only place I drive is in Transcona. I go to the seniors,” she said, a reference I took to mean a seniors’ centre. “When people get sick, I go to visit them. I play cards, talk with them. And I’ve gone to church every Sunday since I was seven years old. And now I haven’t been to church since the 14th of August.”

A few weeks ago she tried walking to church, but she slipped and fell, her cane going one way, her body another.

Later, with Dorothy’s permission, I called the daughter who had been with her during the cognitive test. I wanted to know if there was anything else I should know that her mother might not have thought to mention.

There was something.

“She went for a driver’s test.”

It was done on downtown streets, and Dorothy would have taken the test seated next to a driving examiner with dual-pedal controls, with an occupational therapist in the backseat, observing how Dorothy performed.

“They took her just before the snow, in the fall,” her daughter said. “And she didn’t pass it.”

Later, in hopes of calling Dorothy back with some hope, I contacted MPI and asked if area- or neighbourhood-specific testing might be an option.

Not, it turns out, if a cognitive issue is involved.

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As we approach the end of life’s road, much of what’s left of our journey involves how we cope with loss. The loss of old friends and partners for life who die before we do. And the other kinds of losses, the incremental physical ones or how our minds may gradually leave us before we leave our bodies.

And then there’s the loss of independence. Of course, like Dorothy, we’re all headed in that direction.

With or without a driver’s licence.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca