what happens after you give a family my name
If you direct a senior living community, manage care for an older client, place caregivers in people’s homes, or sit across from families in a law office or a clinic, you already know that passing along a name is not a small thing. When someone asks you who they should call to get their mother to an appointment, they are not really asking for a phone number. They are asking you to vouch for how a stranger will treat someone they love on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, when they cannot be there themselves. The trust that comes with that is borrowed from you, so I think you deserve to know exactly what happens to it after the handoff.
The first call is a conversation, not a booking. I ask who I will be driving and how they move through the world, whether the wheelchair goes everywhere with them or only comes out for longer distances, whether there is a walker that travels along, how many hours they can comfortably be out before the day starts to cost them something. I ask what has gone wrong before, because there is almost always a story. A driver who did not wait. A ride home that never came. A parking lot that turned a routine visit into something exhausting. None of that is paperwork to me. It is how I plan the day so the difficult parts are handled before anyone has to notice them.
I drive every ride myself. There is no rotating pool and no dispatcher, which means the person your resident met the first time is the same person who shows up the fourth time and already knows which side is easier to get in from. For someone who is quietly anxious about being handed off to strangers, that continuity does more good than any promise I could make in a first phone call. It is also the reason I only take on a small number of families at a time. I would rather be genuinely available to a few people than thinly available to everyone.
There are two ways the professionals I work with tend to use me. Some have a resident or client who goes out regularly, standing appointments, a weekly lunch with a daughter, a therapy schedule that repeats, and we build something consistent around it so nobody has to arrange it again from scratch each week. Others call when they are short a driver or a van on a day when someone still needs to be somewhere. Both are welcome. I would much rather be the person you can call on a difficult week than someone you only think of when everything is already running smoothly.
On the day itself I arrive early, and I plan for the things that quietly ruin schedules: weather, a clinic running behind, the reality that someone who moves slowly should never be hurried across a parking lot in February. I know Barrington and the Northwest suburbs well, though I would not claim to know every entrance of every building. What I can promise is that I arrive with enough time to find the right one and walk it with them, rather than pointing at the door from the curb.
If something comes up, you hear about it from me. A family member who sounded overwhelmed, someone who seemed less steady than the last time, an appointment that ran an hour long. I am not trying to step into your role or become the family’s case manager. But you put me into a day you are responsible for, and anything that matters should find its way back to you instead of sitting quietly with me.
I should be equally clear about what this is not. This is a private chauffeur service rather than a medical one. I do not provide clinical care, and I do not wait inside during appointments as a matter of course, though I often do when a family asks and I am glad to. What I bring is a wheelchair accessible vehicle, twenty years of driving with the last four focused on older clients, and the kind of attention that makes the ride the easiest part of someone’s day.
If you have a resident, client, or patient in mind, or you would simply like to know who you are recommending before the need is urgent, call me at 224-578-2301. I would much rather have that conversation on a quiet afternoon than in the middle of someone’s emergency.