Bedtime Story #2

Prompted by a story over on John Robertson's blog about breaking in to people's houses, I remembered a funny job from last year.

My partner and I got dispatched to do a welfare check on an old lady that hadn't turned up to collect her prescription medicine from a pharmacy for a couple of days. The pharmacist had to contacted the local doctor and found out she'd missed an appointment there too, so after trying to phone her, he contacted the Ambulance service. Nice to see there are still some caring souls out there.

I've done a fair few of these kind of jobs and they can be a little unpleasant - you often have to force a window or a door and go in, sometimes only to find you are too late by a matter of days.

We arrived and went through the process of knocking loudly on the door. All the blinds were drawn and there was no answer. We couldn't get around the back to try the back door because of a big steel fence. I tried to open a sash window and saw it had a small nail holding it closed from the inside. With a bit of huffing and puffing I was able to bend the nail and force the window up. We let our dispatcher know we had gained access and were going in for a look. I stuck my head in the window, parted the lace curtains and called out "hello?"...... silence.

I told my partner he’d better follow me in through the window – we’re a team right? He called me a big chicken and suggested he’d wait out front with all the bags for me to go in and open the front door. I couldn’t come up with any kind of argument that his was a bad idea so in I climbed. I kept calling out hello.. anybody home? Nothing but silence. I really hoped she didn’t own a big hungry dog. The fact that I was getting no answer left me thinking this was probably not going to end well. Whenever you are in somebody’s house like this without being invited – it is a very strange feeling.

I went out of the lounge and into the hall to open the front door. I grabbed the lock and tried to turn it. Nothing happened, it was locked from inside with a key. Damn. I called out to my partner and told him my predicament. He helpfully began laughing while I searched the hall table for a key. I’m searching among the dust and jars of potpourri, when I hear a voice behind me. What are you doing in here!! I whirl around and there is a very, very old lady, in a dressing gown with crazy looking white hair and a walking stick raised ready to brain me. Ahhhh! I think I said a word I would not normally utter in front of an old lady and quickly told her I was from the Ambulance and we were just there to check up on her. She was very deaf and hadn’t heard me calling out. I persuaded her I was not a robber and she put down the stick. Once she finally found the key and let my partner in – who by this stage was wiping away tears from laughing so hard – we found out what had been happening.

The old woman had been feeling ‘poorly’ for the past few days and decided she would go get her tablets when she was good and ready. I told her that people had been trying to call her on the phone and she said “that thing is always ringing... I never answer it anymore”. We checked her over thoroughly and after finding nothing obviously wrong, we contacted some relatives who promised to come over to spend some time looking after her until she was feeling better. I hope they did.