Home Visits Can Be Fraught With Danger

As I write my second book, which is about the home visits I have made over the years, I am resurrecting memories from my mind and the pages of my journals. Today’s post shows a time when I didn’t use common sense and how home visits can be fraught with danger. 

One day in early fall, on my drive back to the hospital after making all my scheduled home visits, I found myself passing by a patient’s apartment on the westside of Chicago. Since I was ahead of schedule, I decided to drop in, unannounced. I had the time. My patient had a caregiver: a tall, muscular man who always opened the door to the first-floor apartment wearing a long blond wig and thick make-up. Despite his flamboyant appearance, he gave competent care to his charge: a bed-bound, uncommunicative middle-aged man with multiple sclerosis. 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 rooms above her son’s and was often present when I came. However, this day I walked into an unlocked and empty apartment. Only my patient, lying in bed in the darkened bedroom, 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. My patient smiled at him knowingly.

The man removed his jacket and tossed it on the sofa. 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’m just leaving,” I said as I promptly packed up my nursing bag. 

Safely back in my car, my breathing heavy and my hands shaking, 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. 

Sometime after that impromptu visit, at a nursing conference, I sat fixated as another home health nurse told a story about the time that she had made a scheduled visit. She rang her patient’s doorbell. 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 bell. Good thing the door wasn’t unlocked. 

Home visits can be fraught with danger.