The Hours Your Calendar Didn’t Account For.

My calendar said today started at 8. Today started at 5:43.

I’ve been an Executive Director for eleven years. Two buildings before this one, a hundred and four beds now — assisted living and memory care, one campus, one front door, one parking lot where I sit at the end of the day before I drive home. People ask me what I do. I say I run a building. What I actually do is run toward the things nobody scheduled.

The job is the interruptions. The calendar is the lie I tell myself so I can plan a day around them.

5:43 a.m. — the first call

It was the night nurse. Mr. Halloran fell at 5:38. Not hurt — not visibly — but on the floor, alert, embarrassed. By 5:51 I had the family on the phone, the on- call physician paged, and a note in my head for the morning standup. Today, the Tuesday I had planned, was no longer today. Today was now whatever Mr. Halloran’s fall turned it into.

6:47 a.m. — the standup

Two no-calls. A med tech and a 7-to-3 caregiver in memory care. The schedule rewrites itself before I’ve poured coffee. My staffing coordinator already has three names texted out. One says yes. We’re short one. We will be short one all day. I will cover the hall myself between 2 and 4. I will not put that on the calendar because if I put it on the calendar I will have to admit it’s a recurring meeting.

8:32 a.m. — the DON closed your door

My Director of Nursing has worked with me for six years. She does not close the door lightly. She brought a Kleenex from the front desk and put it on my desk before she sat down. She is the steadiest person in this building, and today she is the one who needs it. We sat for twelve minutes. I did not look at my phone. I will look at it after she leaves and there will be nine things. They can wait twelve minutes. Most things can.

The hours between the meetings

A bird got into the dining room at 8:47. Maintenance has it on video. So does everyone with a phone. The lost delivery driver showed up at 9:23 — third time this month, always at the loading dock that isn’t ours. At 11:14 Mrs. K’s daughter stopped me in the hallway and said thank you for what you do. I wrote it down in my notebook because on the harder days I read those entries back and remember that what I do is, in fact, a thing some people see.

At 11:48 I went into the memory care hallway to check on a new resident. He looked up at me and said, You came. He thought I was his son. I held his hand for two minutes. There is no billing code for that. There is no calendar entry for it. If you ask me what I did between 11 and noon, the answer is: I ran a building. The long answer is: I held a man’s hand for two minutes and he was, briefly, less alone.

“The calendar is what the regional sees. The hallway is what the residents see. The gap between them is what I do.”

The two laps

At 2:47 I did my second walk of the day. I picked up six pieces of trash, fixed a crooked picture frame in the second-floor lounge, asked a caregiver how her son’s surgery went, and got three updates I would not have gotten in any meeting: a hospice case that was about to get harder, a maintenance request that had been open for nine days that I had never seen a ticket for, and the fact that the second-shift cook was thinking about quitting. Three things, none of them on the dashboard. All three of them mine to carry by 3 p.m.

4:51 p.m. — the meeting that wasn’t on the calendar

The 5 p.m. wasn’t a 5 p.m. It was a daughter who flew in from Denver because her mother’s decline this month wasn’t in any of the updates the family had been reading. She wasn’t angry. She was the worse thing — she was disappointed. I sat with her for forty minutes. I told her the truth. I told her what I knew, what I didn’t know, and what we were going to do about both. She didn’t hug me. She shook my hand. That was the right amount.

6:43 p.m. — the parking lot

I sat in my car for ninety seconds with the engine off before I drove home. Not crying. Not on the phone. Just sitting. This is the part of the day no one sees and no one asks about. It is also the part of the day that makes the next day possible. I have done this in every parking lot of every building I’ve ever run. I suspect every ED reading this has too.

9:34 p.m. — the final text

The night nurse texted All good. Two words. I let go of the day. I let go of Mr. Halloran. I let go of the daughter from Denver. I let go of the cook who is thinking about quitting and the maintenance ticket that was never opened and the DON who needed twelve minutes. I let go of the bird in the dining room, which is still funny, and the man in memory care, which is not.

If you ran a building this week, you ran a building this week. That’s the whole sentence.

Nobody scheduled today. I did. That is the job. The calendar is the thing the regional sees. The hallway is the thing the residents see. The gap between them is where I live, and the only reason this building runs is because someone — me, today, you on the day you read this — is willing to live there.

A platform doesn’t replace the parking lot. Nothing replaces the parking lot. But a platform can stop being the eighth thing on the list at 11 p.m. It can stop making me the only person in the building who knows the maintenance ticket exists. It can stop hiding the hospice case from the daughter in Denver until she flies here to find out. It can give me back the twenty minutes I lose every morning rebuilding a schedule that already rewrote itself.

Not all the minutes. Some of them. Enough that the parking lot is ninety seconds instead of nine minutes. Enough that I’m still here in year twelve.

The hours your calendar didn’t account for. You did. You always have.

— Theresa, Executive Director · Assisted Living & Memory Care · As told to SeniorCRE^®