A Fonthill woman is angry after her 82-year-old husband was dropped off at the wrong long-term care home in Welland after a weekend Father’s Day visit.
“She intentionally dropped him off there,” Catherine MacPherson said, after her husband, Glenn, was left outside the Royal Rose Retirement Home in Welland, rather than Rapelje Lodge, where he has been living for the past two years. Glenn suffered a major stroke six years ago, and two years ago was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma in his right leg.
“This woman was unpleasant, she was miserable,” MacPherson, 79, said. “She was on her cellphone.”
Glenn, who is in long-term care at Rapelje Lodge, came home to the couple’s Fonthill condo on Saturday before going back the following day. MacPherson booked the trip with Grand Taxi in Welland.
“For the first time, I used a wheelchair taxi service,” MacPherson said. “Normally I would have used Niagara (Specialized) Transit, but they don’t run on the weekend (to Welland).”
The fact that her husband was dropped off at the wrong home was simply the icing on the cake for journeys filled with problems, starting with the driver calling MacPherson to say her husband was not at the pickup point outside the lodge on Saturday.
“The woman said she would not go inside,” she said.
When it came time for Glenn to return to the lodge on Sunday and the taxi arrived to pick him up, it was the same driver from the day previous.
“She was miserable from the outset,” MacPherson said, adding the driver demanded MacPherson help load Glenn into the van.
“I’m not strong enough,” MacPherson said. “That’s her job. I did hold him still while she strapped him in. She started yelling at me. We got into a heated altercation and she said she wasn’t going to take him.”
In the end, the driver did leave with Glenn, presumably to head back to Rapelje. That, however, wound up not being the case and Glenn was dropped instead at Royal Rose Place in Welland, along with other passengers that had been picked up.
“He called me,” MacPherson said. “He didn’t know where he was.”
When reached by PelhamToday, Berenstes Rustti, who identified himself as the owner of Grand Taxi, was apologetic.
“We are so sorry,” he said. “The driver misunderstood.”
The driver, he added, is no longer employed by Grand Taxi.
“She has left the company,” he said.
When asked if the driver had, in fact, been fired, Rustti said yes.
MacPherson, meanwhile, had been trying to get hold of Rustti since the incident occurred on Sunday.
“I’ve been getting a runaround,” she said. “They’ll say he’s not there and that he works nights. I call again and they say he’s not there.”
But when PelhamToday called, the woman who answered put Rustti on the phone immediately when she was informed it was a member of the media that was calling.
In addition to apologizing, Rustti said that it was a policy at Rapelje to not have cab drivers come inside for pickups.
“They bring them outside. They don’t want to take the risk,” he said.
A spokesperson for Niagara Region said, however, that is not the case.
“I can confirm that we do not have a policy that prohibits taxi drivers from coming inside the long-term care home to pick-up (or) drop-off a client,” said Bryan Sparks, a communications consultant at the Region.
MacPherson, meanwhile, just wants to put the whole incident behind her.
“I thought about taking legal action, but decided not to,” she said. “But people should know what happened.”