u/UsedToTeachYa

This morning started out normally enough—except that my brother’s transportation to PACE was very, very late.
My brother is disabled and has cognitive issues, and every weekday a bus picks him up and takes him to his PACE program. This morning, the bus was so late that I was just about ready to bring him back inside and assume it wasn’t coming.
Then, around 9:30, a vehicle finally pulled up.
It wasn’t his regular bus. In fact, it was an odd-looking van that I had never seen before. But there were other people inside, strapped safely into their seats, who were obviously being transported to a program. So although I thought it was strange, I didn’t think too much about it.
Still, something told me, take a picture of that van.
So I did.
My brother got on, and off they went.
Fast-forward to this afternoon. He normally gets home somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00, occasionally as late as 5:15. At 5:30, there was still no sign of him.
I started getting concerned.
I was talking to my son, who reminded me that school has started again in Broward County and traffic could be terrible. That made sense. I also knew there was a new driver. Maybe traffic was bad. Maybe the van had broken down. There were plenty of reasonable explanations.
But the later it got, the less reasonable any of them seemed.
I called PACE. The program was already closed, although someone answered and suggested that the delay was probably just traffic.
Then it was 5:45.
Then it was getting close to 6:00.
Still no brother.
Finally, I called a friend who works for Jewish Family Services, which runs the program. When I explained what was happening, she immediately realized something wasn’t right. She started calling people higher up in the organization to find out where my brother was.
Nobody seemed to know.
Then I remembered something.
“Oh, by the way—I took a picture of the van that picked him up this morning.”
I sent her the picture. She forwarded it to the people trying to figure out what was happening.
And then came the response:
“We don’t have any bus that looks like that.”
At that point, my heart dropped.
All I could think was: Oh my God. I put my disabled brother on the wrong van. Where did he go?
My brother does carry a cell phone, but because of his cognitive problems, he doesn’t remember how to use it properly. I couldn’t reach him, I couldn’t locate him, and nobody seemed able to tell me where he was.
By now, I was freaking out.
It was getting close to 7:00, and I was actually trying to figure out how I was going to call the police and explain:
“My disabled brother is missing, and this morning I let him get into a strange van.”
I was just about ready to make that call when—
THE VAN PULLED UP.
There was my brother.
Safe and sound.
And yes, he had been at PACE all day.
It turns out PACE had needed to use a private transportation company, and apparently that information had never made its way to the people who needed to know. Even the parent organization didn’t realize that this particular private van had been used.
So now they’re investigating what happened and apparently filing a grievance over the transportation situation.
But for nearly two hours, I had no idea where my vulnerable brother was. The people responsible for the program couldn’t tell me where he was. They didn’t recognize the vehicle that had picked him up. And because of his disability, I couldn’t simply call him and ask, “Where are you?”
Thankfully, this story has a happy ending.
But I learned two very important things today.
First, when that little voice in my head says, “Take a picture”—I’m taking the picture.
And second, my brother will now be wearing a location device. If anything like this ever happens again, I won’t have to depend on a transportation company or anyone else to tell me where he is.
I’ll be able to find him myself.
Because I never, ever want to experience those two hours again.

Has anyone who had a tkr also had a partial in the other knee? I was recently at a luncheon where the guest speaker was a surgeon from Mount Sinai who only does partial’s and said it is usually just as successful and that the recovery time is much less.