Part 2 of 3 (click here for Part 1)
We were stuck in the bathroom with a door that wouldn’t budge. We looked at each other and realized that we had forgotten to bring her bathrobe in with us. It just seemed to get funnier and funnier to us. There were only two towels that were not wet, which my mom could put around her. Thank God she wasn’t cold. Then we looked around and the telephone my mother always kept in the bathroom was not there. She had just not gotten back in the habit of putting it in there in the morning like she always did. She just wasn’t in her normal routine yet.
And then it hit me! My phone was in my purse on the couch in the living room. Usually we have two phones and her “button” in the room with us. Now we had nothing, no way of communicating to the world beyond the bathroom. We both realized this at the same time. We looked at each other and laughed some more. I jokingly said, “What’s the worst that can happen? If we don’t show up tomorrow afternoon for your doctor’s appointment, then people will know that something’s up.” I had no idea how close it would come to that!
We fully expected my brother to call. He is really a great son, so attentive and loving. He watches over Mom like a mother hen. (And I mean this in the nicest way possible.) And she loves it! What mother wouldn’t? But no call came.
At least we each had somewhere to sit. There was the toilet and the shower chair. And we had water! This was really good news. Being stuck without these two things would have been so much worse. Not to mention the fact that one of our seats had dual purposes. Ha, ha. The hinges were on the other side of the door. I decided to see if there was something I could use to unscrew the doorknob. I rifled through the drawers and found a tiny little screwdriver. I loosened the screws and the doorknob fell outside the door. “Good,” I thought.
I looked through the hole and saw the area where I could try to turn the small square part inside the door so that I could pull back whatever was catching the door into the jamb. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was pretty sure that I was moving in the right direction. I could see down the hallway where the sunlight was hitting the wall at the end of the hall. By now, it was probably about 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon.
I must have worked on that hole in the door on and off for a couple of hours or more during our ordeal. Other things we did include: banging on the door with our fists, with a wooden hairbrush and any other hard thing we could find. I even threw my body at it. But my mom didn’t like it and she made me stop.
We took turns sitting on the toilet and the shower chair. We sat across from each other and prayed. We even danced a few times. We still laughed and talked and laughed some more. We kept focusing on the good things. We did have water and a toilet and somewhere to sit. These were very good things. But, most of all we had each other.
This really good