Oh Boy! It’s getting real, people!! I have a friend who went off my “radar”.
I have a good friend who lives far away from me. We’ve been talking on the phone with increasing frequency over the years and had already decided that we needed to check in at least once a month. My friend moved states recently, and it was a rough move as he didn’t have anyone to help him.
Before I left on a vacation, my friend and I had a brief conversation (4 minutes according to my phone records), and he was doing very well and happy with his recent relocation. He had just celebrated his 77th birthday.
A week later, I sent him an email with my vacation schedule, and then I followed up with a phone call. He didn’t answer his phone, so I left a message to let him know about the email.
I was a little worried that he would think I was being invasive, but I thought he should know. Off I went on vacation to a different time zone.
A week after that, on vacation, I still hadn’t heard from him. I called his number again without success. It just didn’t seem like something he would ignore.
Although I felt very uncomfortable doing it, I decided to take the extraordinary step of calling the management office of his new apartment building. The receptionist referred me to the manager, who looked at his file. Apparently, my friend had put me down as an emergency contact, so she spoke to me. After a short conversation she indicated that nobody had seen him in the last week, and she couldn’t go to his apartment to check on him. She asked if I wanted her to call the police for a wellness check at my request. I said yes, please.
I know! It’s uncomfortable to have the police check on a friend! But I was worried because he lived alone and had diabetes. I had visions of him lying on the flour in his apartment for the last week. And lest you think I’m being dramatic, in my defense, it has happened to people I know. In one case, it was an elderly relative who fell at 10 p.m. at night and wasn’t discovered until the neighbors did their morning check on her.
Most of us don’t feel comfortable ordering a home invasion. In this case, the results were mysterious. The manager called back to say that my friend wasn’t in the apartment and hadn’t been seen for at least a week, maybe longer. There was some speculation (not fact-based) that he might be in the hospital.
The manager told me which hospital was closest to the apartment building, and I called that hospital without success. He wasn’t listed as a patient. I looked on a map and started calling hospitals in the area, but none of the hospitals had patients by that name.
I called his health care provider without any luck because I am not listed as an emergency contact. I tried to contact the police to see about filing a missing persons report. And finally, I called the Medical Examiner’s office (the morgue). Nobody had a record of him.
The day ended with only a small amount of information. He wasn’t in his apartment, and he probably wasn’t dead!
The next day, I decided to call his healthcare provider again, with a fuller explanation for my concerns. This is a frustrating process because the automated prompts ask for a lot of information I didn’t have. When I finally got a person on the line, I explained the situation and said I thought his doctor might know where he was if she had referred him, but if she had not been involved, she should be aware that he might be in medical danger.
I was put on hold for a period of time, and when the agent came back on the line, she told me that they were aware of where he was (she made reference to an “institution”) and that his being there was not related to diabetes. She said he was in a safe place.
It’s important to be aware that medical providers are not permitted by law to disclose information about a patient unless the person who is asking has been named as an emergency contact. This isn’t a major legal process. It’s simply filling in the name and phone number of someone you trust where you asked to name an emergency contact when you are signing up for a medical service provider.
I now knew that my friend was alive and, I assumed, in a hospital. I returned to calling the hospitals, starting (again) with the one closest to his home. This time, his name was on the list of patients, but nobody answered when I was connected to his room.
Less than five minutes later, I received a call from my friend on his cell phone. He had suffered a fall approximately 10 days before when he was walking near his home. He had been taken to a trauma center, but he didn’t know which hospital. He was disoriented but at least he was alive and was being treated. And I knew the hospital!
The day after we talked, my friend emailed a picture of his face to me and another friend. The other friend was big news because it meant I had someone to coordinate with! Together, we were able to do quite a few things in the days and weeks that followed, but that’s for another posting.
I’m going to wrap this up now, although the adventure continues. Here are a few simple steps we can take to make sure we can be located in an emergency.
- Set up regular intervals for contact so that your friends can start looking for you if you haven’t made contact. This is helpful, but often falls can have catastrophic consequences in a very short period.
- Make sure you provide an emergency contact to people such as your doctor. They won’t give out any information to people who call unless the patient has listed them.
- Have an emergency contact in your phone. I’m not sure how this works, but I’m assuming it’s available without logging into a phone.
- Give your friends your home address (especially if it’s an apartment building). It would also be helpful to have an office phone number and the name of someone working there if you live in an apartment building. Be sure to sign any documentation that would allow friends to enter your apartment in case of emergency.
- Share friends’ information with a couple of your trusted friends so that they can reach out to each other if you can’t be reached.