Candidate for worst sitter
Our sitter didn’t seem to have any red flags. I interviewed her and she seemed great. She had volunteered for the same charity that we got our dog from, and that meant a lot, since I knew the betting that volunteers go through. When she showed up for the sit, she seemed to be extremely excited for the sit, had scoped out a yoga studio she goes to regularly that is nearby (she is from a nearby city with the same studio). Our first day, she sent an update of her playing with our dog in the park, and things seemed good.
We hadn’t heard from her a couple of days, but we didn’t have a plan for update cadence, so it wasn’t too big of an issue. By the fifth night, we reached out to her to ask if she could take out the garbage. She didn’t respond right away, and I was starting to get a little worried. But I got a reply the next morning, so felt a little better. I asked a follow up question, but got no response. I was a little concerned, but at least we got a response.
The day after, we were heading back. I sent her a message about is getting back. We got back after midnight, so I told her that if she could leave as late as possible, that would be great. I got no response. As we were getting back, I was a little concerned to have not hearing from her.
We got back, and there were lights on in the house. We opened the door, and our dog barked, and came down, happy to see us. We went up to the living room, and noticed there was pee on the floor. He does that when he is left alone, so thought nothing major was wrong. Then I went into the bedroom, turned on the light and she was there passed out. It took me a minute to take in the situation, and noticed that there were more than a few empty liquor bottles around the bedroom. I yelled at her to wake up. There was no response. I kept trying to wake her, but there was no movement at all. We started to look around the house, and noticed more empties. We looked at our spare fridge, and noticed that it had been emptied out. We looked at our liquor cabinet, and it had been mostly cleaned out. We started to mop up the pee and some of the other spilled alcohol from the living room, hoping she would wake up while we did that, making as much noise as we could. We found a sachet that seemed to contain some drugs (at some point). We did some more tidying, and more attempts to wake her, but to no avail. We started to try to figure out what to do for the night. We have a second bedroom with a bed, so we made the bed, and tried to get some sleep while this person sleeps off her binge. We got mobilized around 7, and went up and woke her up. We managed to wake her, get her stuff to the entrance and after a fair amount of cajoling, get her out of the house. We did more cleaning, and 45 mins to an hour later, we saw there was an ambulance out front. We did more cleaning until we got the house to look reasonable and went to get a coffee and a snack. While we were walking to the coffee shop, the ambulance was still there. We heard them talking about which was the best hospital to go to.
Today, she sent a message that her purse was at the house and if we could leave it out for her, it would be appreciated. She said she was just getting out of the hospital.
As best we can figure, fairly soon after she started getting into our liquor. I have no idea how much she took our dog out or even fed him. And the person that we came home to was a completely different person than who we left. Obviously, this person was an alcoholic that relapsed at our house. It was something that we didn’t think about in our vetting process. We’ll have to figure out how we can be confident something like this happens again.