This blog post is meant to be cathartic rather than informative. It may be more information than you really want, so please feel free to skip reading this one.
Our family went to visit relatives who live on the other side of the state this weekend, and I arranged for a friend and neighbor to care for our diabetic cat (needs 2 insulin shots/day) while we were gone.
I was aware that she'd had problems with alcohol abuse in the past, so I made sure that the only alcohol in the house was a small amount of rather nasty-tasting cooking sherry I'd bought a couple of years ago and never managed to use up. Then I didn't think about it again until we came home, couldn't find her to get the key, and found a pane of glass broken in the back door. We got inside, found that some of the glass had been cleaned up, but there was still a large mess on the floor. There was a message on the answering machine from the neighbor saying that her daughter had lost the key, gotten frantic about the cat, and broken the window to get in to give him his medicine. My husband kept wondering why she hadn't tried to call my cell phone first.
The neighbor's husband came by the next afternoon to deliver the key and tell me what had really happened.
She'd found some prescription medication in our upstairs bathroom (husband's for high blood pressure). She was acting strange after her first trip up to give the cat his shot, and more so after the second. He confronted her and confiscated the key. She came back to our house later and broke the window to get in. And all for a medication that, by the amount missing from the bottle, was at such a low dose that the effect had to be purely mental.
So, my son is losing his best friend (her daughter, who will now be staying at her dad's parents and going to school where they live), and I'm still fighting depression and shock. Because I've only left my children with three people that we're not related to, and she was one.
