Home Visits Can Be Fraught with Danger

One time, long ago, at a nursing conference, I sat fixated as a fellow nurse told a story about the time she rang the doorbell at her patient’s house, and he didn’t answer. It was later that she found out he had been murdered. And in hearing more detail, she discovered that the murderer had likely been in the house the exact time she was ringing the doorbell.

Home visits can be fraught with danger.

One time I visited a patient who wasn’t on my list for that day only because I was in the neighborhood and had the time. He was bed ridden and unable to speak. He had a caregiver, a tall, muscular man who wore a long blond wig and make-up but masculine clothes, such as jeans and a sweat shirt. He was attentive and capable and flamboyant. An exotic array of visitors wandered in and out of the apartment. My patient’s mother, strikingly average-looking compared to the rest of the visitors, lived in an apartment above her son’s and was often present when I came. However, this day, unannounced, I walked into an unlocked and darkened apartment. Only my patient, lying in bed, was present.

Neither the caregiver, nor the patient’s mother, or anyone else familiar to me entered the apartment while I was there. However, as I finished with my evaluation, a man opened the unlocked apartment door. He wasn’t anyone I had seen before. In fact, he was unimpressive in slacks and button-down shirt. My patient smiled at him knowingly. We introduced ourselves. His eyes moved down my body. Acutely aware of the precarious situation I was in—alone in that apartment with a strange man and unhelpful patient—a band tightened around my chest. I promptly packed up my nursing bag and left.

Safely back in my car, I chastised myself for making this impulsive visit. No one back at the office knew where I was. It was a time before cell phones. What If something had happened to me . . . .  I didn’t want to think of that. I never again made an unscheduled home visit.

As I work on my second book, which is about home visits, I contemplate my experiences. I want to include the various unsafe situations visiting nurses may find themselves. It’s not just the “iffy” neighborhoods that may hold danger.

For example, I have previously posted a story about a patient that might have been murdered by a family member. When I drove down the tree-lined street in a middle-class neighborhood to make a last follow-up visit to the widow, it never occurred to me that foul play, and not terminal cancer, could have caused my patient’s death.

There are other dangers to home visits, of course. One nurse I knew broke her leg while stepping on an uneven floor; another was attacked by the family dog. Environmental conditions, such as inclement weather, flooded roads and extreme temperatures, are a constant threat to home visits. Once my windshield wipers died on me as I drove on the highway in a snow storm.

Yes, home visits can be fraught with danger.