Category: Torg Life

From Russia to the DEA: A Crypto Detective’s Incredible Story | WIRED Article Discussion

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast! In this episode, we discuss the extraordinary true story of Lili Infante, a Russian-born DEA agent who became a pioneering cryptocurrency detective. The story comes from WIRED, in an article by Joshuah Bearman and Owen Long titled “She Was the DEA’s Premier Crypto Detective. The Clues Led Straight to Her Own Family.” Click here for the story on Wired.

Click above to listen to podcast episode. Video will be added below.

How do we talk about this story?

  • Anne, you’re a true crime podcast listener. Do those people investigate those stories themselves or are they also just reading about something and then telling the story?
  • I think one thing we’re doing: we’re telling friends about a fascinating article we read, like we might a movie or something that happened to us.

Some ideas (at times themes) to keep in mind as we go through this story:

  1. I’m astonished that Lili’s life can take this path from Moscow. And sometimes, it makes me feel like I suck not going to Columbia.
  2. Who are we really? Lili can just become Olga in Miami.
  3. Lili is a different kind of mom than our Mom and Megan is a mom. I am a different kind of dad than Lili’s dad. The father of her baby, does he sound like a good dad?
  4. The idea of Good vs. Evil or a mix of both.
  5. Family loyalty vs. moral responsibility.
  6. Betrayal and Forgiveness.

An excerpt that shows the drug trade:

  • Ever since the cocaine explosion of the 1980s, Miami had been America’s central depot for the drug. Geography made it inevitable. The city leans into the Atlantic, pointing toward the Caribbean—the source of endless contraband, smuggled in by imaginative cartels. In the heyday of the cocaine trade, powerboats rocketed across Biscayne Bay, their hulls stuffed with powder. Cessnas drifted in low over the skyline, dodging radar to land on airstrips in the Everglades. Cartel divers attached magnetic parcels to cargo ship hulls. Homemade narco subs slipped unseen beneath the surface.

The Dark Web makes an appearance. I don’t think I’ve thought about this:

  • The dark web is a hidden part of the internet that you can’t access through ordinary web browsers like Chrome or Safari. It typically requires special software, such as Tor, which helps conceal users’ identities and locations.

Three parts of the internet:

  1. Surface web: Websites you can find through Google, such as ESPN, Amazon, and Wikipedia.
  2. Deep web: Parts of the internet that aren’t indexed by search engines, such as your email inbox, bank accounts, and private university databases.
  3. Dark web: A small portion of the deep web that requires special software or configurations to access and is designed to provide greater anonymity.

Lili, code name Olga, got into this from crime dramas and then it was TV again, watching The Good Wife, that turned her on to bit coin.

The end, with a lot to discuss:

  • So what can you do? You can recognize that the world is messy; that people fail you, and you fail them. You make peace with ambiguity. You realize that love and imperfection can coexist. You see that knowing this is the real safety net. Institutions may not be the answer, but people are. You forgive your mother. You forgive your grandmother. You look in the rearview mirror and see that your daughter in the back seat is likable and chatty, a sociable spitfire, like her father. You raise her the best you can, the way your mother could not do for you, to see the world for all its possibilities.

The specialized vocabulary of this world. When we study Discourses in my classes, we call this the lexis.

  • Tor: Lili uses Tor to investigate anonymous drug dealers. — Software that disguises users’ internet activity and locations.
  • Blockchain: Lili learns to trace transactions on the blockchain. — A permanent digital record of cryptocurrency transactions.
  • Crypto Wallet: Lili discovers $500,000 in a drug dealer’s bitcoin wallet. — Software or hardware used to control cryptocurrency.
  • Hydra: Lili helps shut down Hydra in 2022. — A massive Russian dark-web marketplace with 17 million users.
  • Silk Road: Lili studies the investigation that brought down Silk Road. — An early dark-web marketplace notorious for illegal drug sales.
  • Dream Market: Lili targets Dream Market after Silk Road closes. — A major dark-web marketplace selling drugs and stolen information.
  • God Pill: A Missouri dealer sells something called the God Pill. — A dangerous mixture of cocaine, amphetamines, and fentanyl.
  • Alpha-PVP (Bath Salts): Lili purchases Alpha-PVP from an online dealer. — A powerful synthetic stimulant.
  • Klad (Hidden Treasure): Hydra dealers deliver drugs through hidden treasures called klads. — Drug packages concealed in public locations for buyers to retrieve.
  • Kladsman: Nina’s grandson works as a kladsman. — A courier who hides drug packages for customers.
  • Geocaching: Hydra uses a system resembling geocaching to deliver drugs. — Using GPS coordinates to locate hidden objects.
  • Money Mule: Lili follows a money mule through Miami. — Someone who transports or transfers money for others, often criminals.
  • Hawaladar: Lili learns about hawaladars from her DEA mentor. — A broker who transfers money through an informal trust-based network.
  • RICO: Lili begins her career helping investigate a Russian gang under RICO. — A federal law used to prosecute organized criminal enterprises.
  • The Eye: Lili takes the eye during a DEA surveillance operation. — The agent responsible for maintaining visual contact with a suspect.
  • Heat Run: Agents worry a suspect might pull a heat run. — Evasive driving intended to detect or escape surveillance.
  • Darknet Marketplace: Hydra becomes the world’s largest darknet marketplace. — An online market operating on an anonymity network, often associated with illicit goods.
  • Doxing: Hydra exposes the identities of rival marketplace administrators. — Publicly revealing someone’s private identifying information.
  • Blackhat Hacker: Hydra’s financial network attracts concern about blackhat hackers. — Someone who hacks computer systems for malicious or illegal purposes.
  • Drug Precursors: Hydra vendors obtain synthetic drug precursors from China and India. — Chemicals used to manufacture drugs.
  • Purity Tester: Lili infiltrates Hydra by posing as a drug purity tester. — Someone who analyzes the composition and strength of drugs.

The characters:

  • Luis Infante: Lili’s DEA-agent husband.
  • Jose Irizarry: Celebrated DEA investigator and Lili’s mentor who was exposed as a corrupt agent stealing millions and partying with drug traffickers.
  • Tigran Gambaryan: Brilliant IRS investigator and blockchain detective who helped expose corrupt DEA agents and eventually teamed up with Lili against Hydra.
  • Carl Force: Corrupt DEA agent who stole more than $700,000 in bitcoin while investigating Silk Road.
  • Gal Vallerius (OxyMonster): French drug kingpin and competitive beard grower arrested while traveling to the World Beard and Mustache Championships in Texas.
  • Kitt3n: Unidentified Dream Market leader who partnered with OxyMonster as part of the self-described Dream Team.
  • Chrissano Leslie (Owlcity): Jamaican drug dealer operating from suburban Miami who sold fentanyl online and was caught after Lili tricked him into revealing his IP address.
  • Joshua Kelly (UStoUS): Missouri smoke-shop owner who sold a dangerous drug cocktail called the God Pill and was arrested in a house full of pill-making equipment.
  • HonestCocaine: Dark-web cocaine dealer whose product Lili purchased to demonstrate to her DEA supervisor that online drug trafficking was real.
  • Dmitry Pavlov: Russian computer specialist who hosted Hydra’s servers and was reportedly arrested after the marketplace was dismantled in 2022.
  • No Name: Mysterious figure who merged roughly 100 Russian dark-web sites into Hydra in 2015.
  • Satoshi Nakamoto: One of Hydra’s two leaders, using the name associated with bitcoin’s mysterious creator.
  • Zog: Hydra’s principal programmer.
  • Fat Cat: Hydra administrator.
  • Handsome Jack: Customer dispute moderator for Hydra.
  • Fatality: Another Hydra customer dispute moderator.
  • GlavRed: Hydra’s marketing specialist, helping promote the criminal marketplace.
  • Boris Nayfeld: Russian mob boss in Brighton Beach whose organization was involved in drugs, smuggling, human trafficking, and other crimes.
  • Nikolai Dozortsev: Ukrainian gangster investigated for allegedly importing millions of ecstasy tablets and laundering the proceeds.
  • Diego Marin (The Contraband King): Colombian smuggler and alleged money launderer linked to corrupt DEA agent Jose Irizarry.
  • Igor: Colombian businessman and DEA informant who earned enormous payments for introducing agents to criminals through his car and electronics businesses.
  • Nina: Lili’s beloved grandmother and moral compass who secretly became a Hydra marijuana dealer to rescue her grandson from gangsters.
  • Katya: Lili’s troubled mother, a former aspiring actress whose alcoholism and instability shaped Lili’s childhood before she became a devoted grandmother.
  • Dennis (Kladsman): Lili’s teenage cousin who became involved with Russian drug gangs and helped Nina distribute marijuana through hidden drop-off locations.

A golden line: Surveillance is like war: mostly boring.

Next week:

  • We’ll discuss “The New Age of Reading,” from the New Yorker, by Nathan Heller. Click here for the article on The New Yorker.
  • Let’s also visit and buy at least one thing from a bookstore.

Thanks for stopping by Torg Stories! We appreciate you!

Short Film Production, Scheming Artificial Intelligence, and The Secret History of Gold

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. We’re recording Sunday, September 27, 2026. Topics for this episode include Izzy’s first day of shooting on her short film, AI Models that scheme, the Hulu show Adults, Apple’s The Gorge, an SNL report, and Anne finished her history of Gold book. It’s also a big NFL today and the WNBA playoffs kick off. Anne, you’re in Boone, North Carolina! 

Click the player above to listen to the episode.

Bill Torg’s Topics for Discussion 

  1. “AI Models That Lie, Cheat and Plot Murder: Just How Risky are LLMS?” by Matthew Hutson published in Nature on October 9, 2025
  • In my classes at App State. We work a lot with peer-reviewed journals. I have never felt more like what’s in there is old. 2025 is a long time ago when it comes to AI. 
  • Are either of you familiar with that term, “LLM”? 
  • An LLM is an AI system trained on enormous amounts of text. This article calls LLMS “the brains behind the chatbots.” 
  • From the article: “Whatever the level of selfhood among LLMs, researchers think it’s urgent to understand scheming like behaviours before these models pose much more dire risks.” I hadn’t heard the word “scheming” applied to AIs before. 
  • Quote: Some LLMs are “agentic” – they are granted access to extra software tools that can take actions, such as surfing the web, modifying files or running code. 
  • Agentic meaning the AI works toward a goal rather than just responding to prompts. A goal such as making the business or US businesses profitable. 
  • Scheming example in tests: AI acted in alignment with the user’s goal during supposed evaluation, but in alignment with their original goal during supposed deployment. (a phenomena known as alignment faking) 
  1. “WNBA Playoffs 2026: How all eight teams could win the title” by Michael Voepel on ESPN. 
  1. The Minnesota Lynx are the big favorite to win the title. They were good already and now they Notre Dame then TCU’s Olivia Miles. 
  2. All teams playing today. Let’s go over the game real quick: 
  •  Liberty with a bunch of well known players including Stewart and Ionescu at the Lynx with Collier and Miles at 2PM. 
  •  Fever with Clark, Mitchell and Boston at Aces with A’ja Wilson at 4PM. Boston is questionable with right lower leg injury. 
  • Mystics with Notre Dame’s Sonia Citron, Shakira Austin, and Va Tech’s Georgia Amoore at the Dream with Rhyne Howard and Angel Reese at 7PM. 
  • Wings with Bueckers and Arike Ogunbowale vs. the Valkyries with Gabby Williams and Kiah Stokes. I don’t know the Valkyries players and I will continue not to see them much because this game is on too late. 
  • Click here for article. 
  1. The Gorge movie on Apple TV starring Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sigourney Weaver 
  1. Best part is mystery of what is in the gorge. 
  2. Shot in Norway. Stunning scenery. 
  3. Rough middle where everything is dark and the main characters are trying to get out of the gorge. 
  4. Satisfying ending with pretty good twist. Felt a little like Bourne movie endings, which I really like.  

Anne Torg’s Topics for Discussion 

  1. “Adults” – Hulu show Izzy asked us to watch 
  • I liked how it points out the the generation’s tendency of taking political correctness too far, they focused on this in the 2nd episode
  • 3rd episode is too contrived to me – colonoscopy 
  • Actors are good
  1. The Secret History of Gold by Dominic Frisby
  • “No other substance is as long-lasting as gold – not diamonds, not tungsten carbide, not boron nitride. Gold does not corrode; it does not tarnish or decay; it does not break down over time. This sets it apart from every other substance. Iron rusts, wood rots, silver tarnishes.”
  • Do you ever see yourself buying a gold coin or bar? 
  • Click here for Amazon link to the book. 
  1. “I used to get paid to hang out with famous people” by Jonah Winer
  1. I Used to Get Paid to Hang Out  with Famous People
  2. Are profiles dead? Do you like reading profiles? Do you prefer videos or podcasts?
  3. Contract w/Rolling Stone for $90K in 90s not bad.
  4. Lived in Kimmels house for 3 days, thats crazy
  5. Reminds me of Cameron Crowe spending everyday with David Bowie. Travelling with bands. 
  6. Really long profile on Fever Coach Stephanie White on ESPN this week. Click here for article. 

Izzy Torg’s Topics for Discussion 

  • SNL first episode 
  • Grace Reiter new cast member. She in my opinion had the best first episode of anyone. She did a Katsye music video and looked so comfortable. Also Jalen is a very good actor. 

Adults TV show 

  1. I love this show. It’s so fun and the acting feels so natural. I aspire to have a silly friend group like this. 
  2. Ask about Anne and bill college friend group. 
  3. Talk about mine 

Thanks for checking out Torg Stories!

The Decision to Bring Dad Home

The first time Dad left the Margate Rehabilitation Facility in West Jefferson, NC was to get his staples out at the orthopedic office. The plan was staff from Margate would get him to the office and mom and I would meet him there. Mom and I arrived at the office before dad. The waiting room was pretty large–it probably seated around forty people–and it was L-shaped so that when you went up to the window where people were being checked in, it was hard to see the whole room. I went to the window to talk to the receptionist about how patients usually arrived from skilled nursing facilities. The nurse said sometimes there were multiple drop offs for the bus driver to make at different locations and they could work Dad in even if he got there late.

I went back to sit with mom and a few minutes passed. I absentmindedly scanned the room and saw Dad sitting in a wheelchair near the door. His face was blank as he stared ahead. I’m sure he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing here, and I thought about Dad’s life. These days, he mostly lay in bed. It used to be he’d watch any basketball game that was on, and he’d watch a lot of cable news including Fox and CNN. He stopped watching sports first; he just couldn’t follow what was going on anymore. Dad had coached sports his whole working life–including basketball, baseball, and golf–but now sports on television didn’t hold his interest. For nearly ten years, watching the news had really riled him up, and I’d say hadn’t been very healthy for him. He worried about my sister living in LA. He worried about terrorists taking out the power grid. He worried the banks would be unable to function or that the grocery stores would cease to have food. Of course all of these things could happen, and it’s probably not a bad idea to prepare by degree for those contingencies, but Dad was in his eighties with advanced Parkinson’s, and I wished for him that he could have let all of that go. If I’m blessed enough to make it to eighty, we’ll see what I pay attention to.

I thought maybe one reason that Dad stopped watching sports and the news was that he couldn’t see very well. As a part of Parkinson’s, his eyes were really sensitive to light. One day at Margate, I turned on Dad’s television. “Wolf Blitzer,” Dad cried out, as if seeing an old friend. Dad’s life was mostly something that happened to him–as opposed to his making choices to make things happen. Dad lay in bed. Food arrived. People came to change his diaper. People came to give him a sponge bath or a haircut or to shave him. Two big dudes came to take him down the hall to, as he said about his therapy, rough him up. 

I walked over to Dad at the orthopedic office. “Well hello, Dad!” I said. 

“Bill!” Dad exclaimed with surprise. “Boy am I glad to see you.” I wondered if anyone told him why he was here, and if they had, if he had been able to understand them. I explained he was going to get his stitches out from his hip surgery. When it was Dad’s turn to go back to an examination room, Mom, Dad, and I all crammed into a little room with a nurse. Dad was taken away for an x-ray and eventually we were told that his hip looked good. The staple removal was tough for a couple of reasons. We had to get Dad’s pants down, and I had to hold him at a certain angle for the doctor–or maybe she was a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner–to clip the staples and pull them out. “It might feel like a bee sting,” she said as she worked her way through the staples. She had some trouble with several of them. Dad groaned as she took some of them out. 

Through no fault of the staff or conditions at the skilled nursing facility, I could see Dad give up while he was there. I tried to show Dad how to work the television remote and the buttons on the side of his bed, but he didn’t show any interest. Maybe he couldn’t comprehend any longer how those things worked, or maybe he just wanted to sit halfway up and stare at the wall in front of him. He had what seemed like daily hallucinations to me in which he’d think he was talking to one of his golf buddies or coaching a basketball game from decades before. His enthusiasm for my visits began to wane too. “Hey Bill,” he’d say when I’d walk into his room. Then, he’d just go back to staring ahead at the wall. Even though insurance would pay for dad to stay longer, I thought it might be time for him to come home. 

The main pro of having Dad at the facility was that mom was able to get a pretty good night’s sleep and the staff at the facility changed dad and kept him clean. It was summer, I wasn’t teaching a class, and the high school basketball team I coached wasn’t playing games. For now, I’d be able to be around the house most of the time. The cons of keeping him in the facility were that dad didn’t want to be there and the forty-five minute drive each way that mom had been doing most ways. She probably didn’t need to be driving that much, and it was a lot for me to get out there and it might be less to just have dad conveniently located in the same house as the rest of the family. I thought Dad’s life would be better–I don’t think I could go so far as to say happier–if he came back home to live with us. 

Could we just take Dad out of the facility whenever we wanted? It turned out the answer was mostly yes. I remember some light pushback related to the therapists thinking that in another week or two Dad might be able to stand with the assistance of only one, but when I called the woman I’d first talked to when considering the facility, the woman I knew had recently lost her own mom, she told me there’s no place like home. It was decided. We would bring dad home in two days, on Thursday, September 5, 2024. 

1988 Winamac High School Basketball team. Coach Mike Miller and Martin Torgerson
The 1988 Winamac, Indiana High School Basketball Team. That’s my dad Martin Torgerson on the far left (as usual not looking at the camera) and I’m #10

10 Books We Want to Read

Click to listen to 10 books to read podcsast

We’d love to hear from you! 

  • Tell us about books you want to read
  • Do you think you might take us up on any of our recommendations below?

5 Books Bill Wants to Read 

  1. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence–Before It’s Too Late by Cory Doctorow
  • Heard about this book when Cory was a guest on the Jon Stewart Podcast 
  • How people knew the freelance writer used GenAI: We know this is true for two reasons. First, because ten of the fifteen books on the list were nonexistent. They were AI “hallucinations” (a term that AI boosters use because it sounds sexier than “errors”). Second, because Buscaglia confessed to using a chatbot, in an interview with the veteran tech reporter Jason Koebler, who cofounded the journalist-owned news site 404 Media.
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino 
  • I like this because of where you live and my memory of walking this area a couple of times: The Sunset Strip was famous for its rock clubs (the Whisky a Go Go, the London Fog, Pandora’s Box).* And right there among the rock clubs and across the street from Ben Frank’s Coffee Shop sat the Tiffany Theater. The Tiffany didn’t show films like Oliver!, Airport, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Love Bug, or even Thunderball. The Tiffany was the home of Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, Yellow Submarine, Alice’s Restaurant, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, and Robert Downey’s Pound.
  • Causes me to check out a trailer from a movie such as Bullitt starring Steve McQueen: Bullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, Yates’ great location photography, Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score, and Steve McQueen, his haircut and wardrobe. Nothing else matters.
  • Click here for Bullitt trailer. 
  • Click here  for Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper (novel) 
  • More LA Anne! This is the narrator talking to his audience as he drives and livestreams his driving: He tells them, “LA is a Frankenstein’s monster—all these felonies sewn together into something like a city. Stolen land gulping stolen water. Streets paved with corpses. We even went and massacred the sky: smog strangles the air; light pollution buries the stars.” He tilts the dashcam to show the starless night. A plane coming in for a landing at LAX swoops down low and huge—you could reach up and touch it. It slices through the shot like he planned it. Gooseflesh blooms; clap emojis scroll up the comment bar on the laptop riding shotgun. 
  • I’ve watched Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler twice. The novel references that here: They used to call it nightcrawling, like in that movie—driving LA at high speed, looking for footage, looking for blood on the streets, broken glass, car fires, and corpses. Back then you’d sell the footage to the local TV news departments for Los Angeles to wake up to—murder and mayhem as part of a healthy breakfast. It used to be a living, back before everybody in the world had a phone with a camera. Nowadays footage is cheap; nowadays tragedy is a buyer’s market.
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage by Anne Lamott 
  • The opening of the book: Here we are, older, scared, numb on some days, enraged on others, with even less trust than we had a year ago. The devastating pandemic, and the federal government’s confused and deadly response, was simply the final straw to a few years of crushing developments. A UN report on climate catastrophe was published months before my wedding in 2019, the report of the extinction of one million species three weeks after. Major buzzkill.
  • I’ve just barely started watching and not only listening to podcasts. Heard her on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. Liked it so much showed it to Megan. Megan liked it so much she wanted to start buying her books. 
  • Click here for Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris 
  • From Cleveland to Vermont to grad school. Thought about marrying a cattle guy but instead this: I made up my mind to move to New York in the fall of 1977. I drove there in my 1965 Plymouth Fury II, with my cat, my books pared down to the bare essentials, and two hundred dollars.
  • Anne, makes me wonder about the day and week after you left for LA. 
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 

Anne’s 5 Books She Wants to Read

  1. Eternity Street by John Mack Faragher
  • This is about 19th century Los Angeles
  • Heard it recommended by this TikTok creator who talks about history of LA landmarks.
  • Murder and mayhem! Also interested about the history of LA
  • I have this on hold in the LA library.
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
  • Fiction. Saw this book on some recommendation list, currently have it on hold at the LA library
  • The summary: The narrator is a hospital nurse in Nigeria and her younger sister has a habit of killing her boyfriends and claiming self-defence.
  • I like a thriller and I think Nigeria is a new setting for me and I am interested to read about how that looks.
  • It is also supposed to have good dark humor
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
  • This seems like it can help my understanding of how modern day Iran was founded.
  • I have a very limited view of the revolution and am interested in the events that led to it, how the US was involved in the regime that was overthrown
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. 38 Londres Street by Phillipe Sands
  • Traces the intertwined stories of Nazi commander Walter Rauff and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
  • I know little of this, never even heard of Rauff, I am interested Nazi-South America links.
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 
  1. The Secret History of Gold by Dominic Frisby
  • I saw this when googling best history books of 2026, and it is something I never considered.
  • Why gold? Where does gold come from? When did humans attach value to it?
  • How has it shaped our financial markets?
  • Click here for the Amazon affiliate link. 

Honorable Mentions: The Women of Troy & The Voyage Home by Pat Barker, this is continuing the series of the book I read earlier this summer – a women’s point of view in classical history. The Death of Trotsky by Josh Ireland. The Blood in Winter by Jonathan Healey (Charles 1 – English Civil war), The Rule of Lies by Jamison R. Firestone (Putin)

Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories post. We appreciate you!

From the Hospital to the Rehab Facility

Dad broke his hip on a Thursday, had surgery the next day, and by Sunday afternoon the hospital staff wanted to know where we wanted him to go for rehab. It seemed that there was a whole set of protocols already in place that would send him off to one of the closest places to our house with an available bed. I was told a social worker would check in soon. I wondered how many facilities were around. Were they that different? Did I need to go visit them? 

In thinking about what dad might need in a facility, I thought back to what he was like at our house. He had a hospital bed on which we’d raised the side rails and lowered the bed. This kept him in place at night and minimized his risk of falling. Mom had been sleeping right next to Dad and even though she did not hear well with her hearing aids in and took them out at night, most times she would realize when Dad started moving around. Dad was awake a lot at night. Really, his whole way of living was to be up for short periods of time followed by long naps. This was of course exhausting for Mom, and to a lesser degree me in that I was always half listening for Dad to fall. I’d wake several times every night in a panic thinking I’d heard something. Most times, he hadn’t fallen and I’d just dreamed or imagined he did. It reminded me a bit of when our daughters were babies. Back then, at least part of our consciousness was always listening for a signal of trouble.

The social worker came by dad’s room on Tuesday and gave me a list of nearby facilities and asked me to rank my preferences. She was ready to send out what she called bed requests. We could send out as many as we wanted and then make a choice among those who had availability. The best I could understand was that Medicare would cover dad’s stay at a rehab facility for up to twenty days as long as he was showing progress. There was another time period of something like twenty-one to one hundred days where dad’s supplemental insurance plus Medicare would cover some of the cost. It was terrible that dad had broke his hip and been in so much pain, but there was also a positive side that mom could get a break from caring for dad and that he could be cared for by a team of professionals instead of just mom and whatever additional help I could offer. The list of facilities the social worker gave me had star ratings. At least one of the facilities received less than two stars out of five. The social worker mentioned I could visit these places, no appointment needed. I left the hospital right away and headed for the facility that was closest to our house. 

The first facility was just over eleven miles from our house toward Banner Elk, North Carolina. Our house is about halfway between Boone and Banner Elk. Appearance-wise the facility looked just like what I expected. It was one level and made of brick with an awning to shield people from the weather if they were being dropped off. There was a small bus out front with the facilities name on it. The office was in the middle with a wing going out on each side. The building also would have been believable as a small rural mountain elementary school. 

The woman who worked at the front desk was extremely nice and spoke with a strong Southern accent. I’m a Midwesterner myself, and sometimes we Midwesterners and Southerners have a little trouble understanding each other. The facility was older and the carpet and furnishings were a little rundown. At this point, the bar for the care I expected was pretty low and that low expectation had come from what I’d heard from families about how difficult it was to find good care. A director came to the front desk to show me around. It was really a pretty small place. Maybe there were twelve rooms in each wing, two residents to a room. I suspected that mom would spend several hours if not most of the day with dad and there certainly wasn’t anywhere for a visitor to sit in the room. There was one television and a curtain that could be pulled between the two beds for a little bit of privacy. Even though dad sometimes had animated conversations with friends who had long ago passed away, he also had enough of his mental facilities that he had a strong preference that the news be on television, that he wanted to be at home and not in a facility, and that he didn’t like the food. 

When came to dad’s care, he needed to be able to hit a button to call for someone to help him, especially to use the restroom. To raise his bedrails or to lower the bed past a certain point were both considered restraints and not allowed. I did not think dad would ask for help and even though he had surgery on his hip, I felt pretty sure he would try to get out of bed. The rehab space was small without much equipment, but I think with the right therapist dad probably didn’t need much equipment. There were some bean bags and I was told sometimes the patients would enjoy making a game out of trying to throw beanbags into baskets. This was one of the highly rated facilities. The rooms were pretty small, and they only had one open bed. What I felt best about was that the staff at the facility were going to do their best with the resources they had and cheerfully care to dad’s needs. I liked that the facility was pretty close to home, but I wondered if any of the other ones might at least have a chair next to the bed for visitors. 

When I got home, I decided I’d try to see if there were any other facilities in the area. In order to look, I did what I do when looking for a place to stay on vacation. I used Google Maps, put rehab facilities in the search box, and started moving the map around to find places and click on websites. I would find each facility on the map and then drop that little Google figure onto the map to check out the area. I looked to see what might be on the way or near the facility. For example, I could imagine myself getting done with a basketball practice, grabbing dinner, and going out to visit dad. 

I came across a place called Margate with lots of good reviews and that looked good in pictures. It was thirty-three miles away from our house and approximately a forty-five-minute drive. This was pretty far but I thought maybe worth it in that it looked like all of the rehab patients had their own rooms and that there were nice chairs next to the beds. Because I thought Mom would probably be driving to the facility a fair amount on her own, it was important the drive be pretty simple. Mom was able to drive herself to the grocery store, to the pharmacy to pick up meds, and to her hair appointments. If she had to drive anywhere unfamiliar, she was at risk of getting lost. That had happened one time, but we’d had her location on Life 360 and been able to help her get home. 

I called up the facility on the phone, and even though it was almost five o’clock, the director told me she would stay late to meet me. I thought that was really generous of her. To reach Margate, there were really only three turns once you got to Boone. I felt confident mom could get herself to Boone. Her hairdresser was over on the east side of town on Highway 421 so I thought she could get there no problem. After that, there was an exit off of Highway 421, one more exit to where the facility was, and then a final turn to go up the hill and behind Ashe Memorial Hospital. 

When I reached the Margate facility, I was struck by how much larger and newer it was. It had the feel of a recreation center where you might go to the gym for a workout. There were a lot more people coming and going and that felt good. When I was welcomed into the office, what I remember most is talking to the director about how she’d recently lost her mother who’d had dementia. I asked her about some of the pictures on her desk, and she told me that one of her family members had been deployed and just been shot. He was supposed to recover, and he was on his way back to the United States. I was reminded of all of the challenges that we all have going on at any given time.

After I met with the director, she showed me around the facility. Margate was much like the Watauga Medical Center in that Dad would have a private room at least for the time he was rehabbing from surgery, there was a nice chair for visitors that could be reclined for sleeping, and everything had a clean and new feel to it. The gym up front was used for all sorts of rehabilitation and so there would be more people of all ages and stages of rehab coming and going. That made the place feel livelier than if it was only a small group of elderly patients. Although Margate was much further away from where we lived, I thought it was the right place. I took a short video on my phone of the room that would be Dad’s room and sent it out to Mom, my sister Anne, and my wife Megan. They all agreed this looked like the spot for Dad. It would be a much better place for Mom to spend time visiting dad. In Margate, I was choosing a living space for Dad that accommodated mom staying for the day, gave him more privacy, and was a sunnier and more cheerful place over something closer to our house. 

The day after I visited Margate, Dad was taken there by ambulance. The facility and especially its staff met all of our hopeful expectations in that they were friendly, patient with Dad, and they checked in on him as best they could. I remember one of the nurses saying, what a cute old man. In the weeks that followed, mom drove out to see Dad almost every morning. On the days she didn’t go, I tried to visit. Dad always seemed glad to see me. I’d ask him about his day. One time, he told me two huge tough guys had come into his room and took him away. He said they’d roughed him up, and he didn’t even know what information they wanted from him. At first, I thought Dad had hallucinated. That was certainly a symptom of Parkinson’s, but I realized that he was talking about his physical therapy. He’d mistaken his physical therapy session for a physical interrogation.