Part 3 of 3 Click here for Part 1

We had no idea what time it was.  I looked through the hole left by the doorknob and I saw that it it had become dark.  But, in the bathroom it was still fluorescent.  There are no windows in my mom’s bathroom.  It is in the middle of the house.  And if there were windows, nobody would have heard us.  Even before my folks added a garage and a house addition, they would have been facing an alley with no traffic.

Time passed, and no calls came from anyone.  My brother faithfully calls my mom at the commercials to talk to her about the shows that they both like to watch.  He didn’t call.  My husband had called and left a message on my phone.  He wasn’t alarmed when I didn’t answer.  He just thought we were busy with something.  Of course we did not even hear my cell ring.  It was in my purse, in the living room.

I stood and leaned on the towel bar at different times.  Then I’d go back to sit in a chair.  We switched back and forth between the chair and the stool.  Then we’d take turns working on the door a while before going back to sit.  We sang songs.  We prayed some more.  Sometimes I would begin to doze while I was sitting and my mom would keep me awake so I would not fall out of the chair.  At one point, I looked through the hole on the door and saw that a new day had begun.

We were starring in a comedy of errors.  And we still laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. But then I began to worry.  Mom is diabetic and has other health issues because of it.  I have epilepsy.  My mom and I had not had anything to eat.  She had missed her medications and so had I.  Her ankles were swelling and she was beginning to flag.  I rolled a rug up and set it on top of an open drawer in the vanity to raise her legs.   I took the two washcloths and got them cold with the tap water.  Then I placed them on her ankles and kept rinsing them to keep them cold.

I began to rub her back and try to keep her comfortable.  At this point I became concerned.  I was worried that Mom would have a reaction to the missed doses of her meds.  I was afraid of having a seizure in front of her, and possibly falling on the hard bathroom floor.

Suddenly, the phone rang.  We got so excited.  It rang and rang and rang.  And then it stopped.  We waited.  Nothing happened.  It seemed to be at least a half hour later till it rang again.  It rang and rang and rang again.

Finally, we heard my brother let himself into the house.  We screamed and screamed!  “We’re in the bathroom!  We’re stuck in the bathroom.”

He came to the door and couldn’t believe we had been stuck in there all night.  From early afternoon the day before until now, it had been twenty hours.  We had been in there for twenty hours!  It took him a half hour to get the door off the hinges.  They were so stuck that they had to be pried apart and he had to use tools to keep each of them open as he pried the next one open.

At last, all of the hinges were propped open.  But the door would not budge.  I even tried flinging my body at it.  It didn’t work.  My brother kept on working on it.  Finally, it came off.  When we examined it more closely, the only thing that had kept the door from opening was a tiny piece of wood about three-eighths of an inch thick.

Of course, he asked us every one of the questions we had asked ourselves so many times during this ordeal. “ Why didn’t you have a phone in the bathroom?”  “Where was your cell phone?”  “Why did you leave the button in the kitchen?”  And then he asked, “Why did you take the door knob off?”  Actually, I thought that was a good idea.  But, never mind that!  He was just upset.

We were free!  We were okay!  And you know what?  It wasn’t so horrible.  It wasn’t even scary, until the end.  One thing was for sure.  If I had to be stuck anywhere, for any length of time, under any circumstance, I could have never chosen anyone better to be with than my mom.  We never lost hope. We never got angry or cross. Most of all, we never lost our sense of humor.  After all is said and done, we actually had a pretty good time.  And now, we have a great story to tell again and again.