As I mentioned in my previous
work update post, I had something very weird happen on the very first night of work at my new job at the hotel. It was weird enough that I had to write about it, but I thought it was long enough that it deserved it's own separate post.
During the first two weeks I was working at the hotel, I and another guy were being trained by an older lady who had been there for years. She was moving out of state, and her leaving was the reason I was hired. The other guy had been working at the hotel for awhile, but he had just moved into the night auditor position the week before, so he was also pretty new to everything we had to do as well.
At around 3:30 in the morning an elderly woman clutching a baby doll slowly rounded the corner into the lobby. We have a front door across from the desk in the lobby that we can see, and a back door that enters into the hotel, directly behind the offices, far enough back in the building that we can't even hear it from the front desk.
So this elderly woman comes into the lobby, and all she can do is whisper,
"hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi."
She's probably at least in her 80's if not 90's, and she can't even tell us her
name, or where she came from. Because of the placement of the back doors, we can't tell if she's come in from outside, or if maybe she wandered out of a hotel room.
The woman training us went out to try to help her,
but without a name, or knowing where she came from, there wasn't much she could do, but she did notice that the woman felt like she was freezing cold, which meant that more than likely she had come in from outside. This was the middle of April, but we had an unusually cold spring, and that particular week we'd had a cold snap. I was coming to work in my winter coat every night, and one morning I left work and there was a thick layer of ice I had to scrape off my car. So yeah, it was cold. Not knowing what else to do, the woman training us had the other guy go get her a blanket, which she wrapped around her, and then got her to sit down in the lobby, and sat with her.
I wondered if she had wandered away from a nursing home, since it was obvious that she had dementia. The fact that she could only repeat one word, as well as the fact that she was carrying a baby doll, which she was treating like a real baby, were all things I had seen a lot when we went to visit my grandpa before he died. He wasn't nearly this bad, but he lived in a dementia ward, and there were a lot of people there who would fit the same description of this woman.
The guy who was training with me decided to try to call the nearest
nursing home, so I did a search on google maps. The nearest one was only 0.2 miles away, practically next door.
It's so close that it had to be where she came from. It seemed obvious that she had escaped, except, having worked in a nursing home, and having spent so much time visiting my grandpa in another one, I kind of knew that there was no way that could have happened. The amount of security they have to prevent the residents from escaping, from locked doors to security alarms, means that there should be no way for someone to escape, and if they somehow managed it, someone would have been alerted before she got very far. She'd have to have been a complete genius to make it past everything, unless someone there was just completely incompetent.
So he called the nursing home, and the person who answered told him she didn't think they were missing anyone, but they'd do a head count and get back to us. And sure enough, they weren't missing anyone, all their residents were accounted for. They
did send over a nurse though, to try to help communicate with the woman,
but she was no more successful that we'd been. She couldn't get her to tell her anything, and she was still whispering,
"hi. hi. hi. hi. hi. hi." over a half an hour later. The nurse asked if she could check her pockets, but she had no form of
identification, she had no life alert or other medical emergency tags or jewelry, and her name was not written in any of her clothes like it
would have been had she been in a nursing home or dementia ward.
Finally
it's nearing 4:30, an hour later, and I suggested calling the police. I didn't know the number, or how to use our phone system yet, so the nurse
gave me her cell phone, where she already has the non-emergency police
number ready. So I called the police, but when they showed up, they're no more successful that any of us.
The nurse finally did get her to answer yes or no questions by shaking or nodding her head, but even that didn't really help, because she did indicate that she had a husband, but in her condition, you never know if that's currently true, or if she's remembering something from a time long ago.
Finally
around five or so, the nurse convinced the woman to get up and come
with her, back to the nursing home. She said she'd find a room for her
and try to get her warmed up, because it's at least an hour and a half
later and she's still cold. The police helped get her out to the nurse's car, and I figured that would be the last we heard
about her. We all got back to work to try and catch up on everything we hadn't been doing for the last hour and a half.
Another hour and a half go by, we've sort of caught up, not quite, but we made pretty good progress considering that two of us didn't really know what we were doing yet. About a half an hour before we left, around 6:30,
someone, I'm assuming the nurse who came to the hotel, called us to let us
know that they found out where the woman had came from.
The area
surrounding the hotel and nursing home is full of apartments and
townhouses where elderly people can live, without actually having to physically move into the
nursing home. I'm assuming sort of like the independent living
apartments at the nursing home I used to work in, except a lot more spread out, like a small neighborhood. This
woman had been living with her husband, who does not have dementia, and he had basically been her caretaker. I don't know this, but I am going to assume he was around the same age. Evidently he'd left the door unlocked, or she knew how to unlock it, and she just got up and left in the middle of the night.
The people at the nursing home said they were going to try to convince the
husband to let them take her, because it was pretty obvious that he can't
care for her on his own. It was very cold that night, like,
maybe
30 at the highest, definitely below freezing. It was a good thing that she just happened to
wander into the hotel, or she could have frozen to death! Obviously I can't really go and find out, but I hope her
husband did agree to let the nursing home take care of her, because she
really needs to be somewhere where she can be supervised.
So anyway, that was my very first night at the hotel.
The woman training us told us after everyone had left, "It's not always like this, I
swear!" And so far it hasn't been. I've been here almost three months now, and so far that was by far the strangest thing that has happened. Nothing else really even comes close. However, if anything else weird does happen, you can be sure that I'll let you know about it. :p
