“Toward the end, this lady was so sick,” Bonnie recalls. “She really was having difficulty breathing.”

That week, the patient’s family was forced to leave her alone one day when Bonnie was scheduled to visit her. The woman’s son worked at an office in Dallas, and her daughter-in-law had to grab some precious time on her day off to run several important errands.

“How will I get in?” Bonnie remembers asking. The daughter-in-law promised she would leave the back door unlocked.

But as so often happens to busy people, the daughter-in-law forgot about her promise. Bonnie arrived at the house, parked the car, and tried the back door as instructed. No luck. She tried all the other doors to the house. Everything was locked up tight.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no, what am I going to do? I can’t just leave.’”

Bonnie went back to her car and tried calling a few other relatives of the patient from her cellular phone, but couldn’t reach anybody. Finally, she remembered that the patient’s bedroom window was frequently open to admit the cool, dry winter air.

“I figured I’d get in that way, but I didn’t want to alarm her,” Bonnie recalls. “So I called her on her bedside telephone.

“The poor woman could barely breathe. I said, ‘Don’t talk! I just want to know if your window is still open a crack.’”

Yes, the patient gasped.

“‘Okay, here I come,’” Bonnie said, and hung up.

Fortunately, the bedroom in question was on the first floor of the house. Bonnie took the outside screen off with the only tool she had handy - her car key. Tossing in her stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, she hauled herself up onto the sill, scrambling her feet against the brick wall to get an adequate toehold.

“I sure was worried that a neighbor would see my butt going through that window and call the police!”

Although she nearly fell in on her head behind a recliner that sat near the window, Bonnie made it inside in one piece. She got up, brushed herself off as if she routinely entered patients’ homes this way. She took the patient’s vital signs, and sat and talked with her for a while. The woman was obviously deteriorating. Bonnie called the son at work and asked him to come home.

She left when he got there, to make her other calls, but she returned at 10:00 that evening to see what, if anything, she could do. By that time, the family had had time to call other relatives and friends in to say good-bye. The patient died at around four o’clock the next morning.

“I’m so glad I climbed in that window and was able to be with her,” Bonnie says today. “I would have felt terrible if I had had to leave her there alone.... so my one experience in breaking and entering was definitely worth it!”