Escaping from Locked Doors

Early one morning before I had a chance to leave the house and head off to see mom, I received a call from the family services co-ordinator telling me mom had "left the facility" the evening before.  "Left the facility? What does that mean?" I asked her.

It means she got out, she escaped; left the building on her own without anyone noticing.

I asked how that could even happen in a facility where all the doors have coded locks. I mean, my mom couldn't remember her own room number, so how would she remember the four or five digit number required to unlock any of the doors? For that matter, how would she even know how to use the lock? Mom had never been exposed to any of that type of alarm locking system in her entire life.

They figure she walked out with a visitor who was leaving. Mom, she could be pretty sly sometimes. She'd head towards the door with her purse and coat over her arm when she saw a visitor preparing to leave. And, she still had times where she appeared to carry on a normal conversation. "Hi, nice day out today isn't it?" and off she went into the outdoor parking lot, which was not gated at all. On the first occasion she hadn't gotten any further than the front of the facility before they noticed her. That was because it was dinnertime, and everyone was in the diningroom, which had very large windows looking out onto the side street. A couple of the girls saw her walking down the street to the front of the building.

Mom, however, was not finished. Not by a long shot. There were many more occasions after that when she'd escape the facility - once, at a time when they were closed to outside visitors because of an outbreak of the flu. The only way she'd have been able to get out was to key the code into one of the exit doors herself. Most of the time they caught her fairly quickly, and she hadn't been able to get more than a few steps off the property before they brought her back in, but it was a concern.

They changed the codes, and locked off the elevator. In order for the elevator to go up or down, you'd need to insert a key - only the staff had keys, and they weren't left at a desk where someone could pick one up by chance.

Still ... mom continued her escape escapades, once almost getting as far as our house before they caught her. How she knew where we lived at that point is something I don't understand. By then, she barely remembered our names, let alone our addresses. They caught her just steps from our door - less than half a small block from our front porch. That was truly frightening to think she could get that far without being missed - at least she'd had the presence of mind to put on a coat (and of course had her ever present handbag with her), but an unnoticed winter escape could have dire consequences for someone like mom. A friend of my father's lost his brother when he wandered away from his nursing home in winter, got lost and wasn't found until the next day, having died from exposure during the night.

We lost count of the number of times she'd gotten out. The staff at the facility had tried pretty much everything. They pinned a door alarm to her coat, and she removed it. They hid one in her purse, and she left it on the night table. They put a bracelet alarm on her wrist, then on her ankle, both of which she managed to get out of. One PSW bought a cute stuffed teddy bear on a zipper pull, and craftily cut it open along a seam and inserted the alarm into it, sewing it back up tidily, and attaching it to the handle of mom's handbag. Mom loved the teddy bear, but left it hanging from the handle of her dresser drawer. Nothing worked. She was determined, and they were at a loss when it came to stopping her.

Eventually, the staff began referring to her as "our Miss Houdini" and had taken to checking on her wear abouts much more frequently.