Dementia can make patients wander: What if they cross the border?

SAN DIEGO — Evelyne Delorme’s most recent wandering episode started with a tiny window of opportunity.

Her husband was asleep. Her son was in the shower. The car keys, usually kept hidden, had been left out in the family room.

Delorme, 71, a cellular and molecular biologist with a Ph.D. from Cornell who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, took the keys and got into the silver Toyota Camry that she had not driven in at least a year.

Four right turns and one left turn put her on Interstate 5, headed south.

She kept going for 30 miles, finally stopping when she crashed into another car — in Tijuana.

“We were very surprised,” said her son, Brian Fish. “I thought she would head north. We didn’t think of Mexico at all.”

Wandering is a common behavioral effect of dementia: An estimated 60 percent of people with the condition will wander at some point, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Patients can become confused and disoriented, forget where they are going or where they live and stumble into harm’s way.

And while wandering is one of the biggest worries facing caregivers, it is especially so near an international boundary, where potentially unfamiliar hazards may loom.

For Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and their caregivers, living on the border comes with unique challenges, according to Monica Moreno, senior director of care and support at the Alzheimer’s Association. “It certainly makes it more complicated,” Moreno said. “There’s more risk of something to happen.”

For Delorme to wind up in Tijuana that day in January required a confluence of relatively unlikely circumstances: Her dementia-driven impulse to wander had to coincide with a caretaker’s momentary lapse, and then she had to happen upon a path to the south, rather than east, west or north.

How often do memory-impaired patients wander across the border? A spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, Jacqueline Wasiluk, said the agency does not keep a formal tally, “but anecdotally, it’s very rare.” Even so, local news outlets have reported at least four incidents in the San Diego area since 2016.

When people with Alzheimer’s or memory impairment do wander across the border, days may pass before they are found and identified. In 1986, a San Diego man was found “shoeless and suffering” under a bridge in Tijuana two weeks after he had wandered from home, the Los Angeles Times reported.

When Delorme’s family discovered that she had driven away, her husband, Leonard Fish, contacted the police while their three grown children began driving around looking for her.

They tried locating her by tracking the iPhone she carried, but the phone was not online. They later learned its battery had run out.

Fish said his wife headed for Mexico by chance. “She just happened to get on the freeway, and if you’re going south on 5, that’s where you end up,” he said. “You’d have to make a decision to turn off not to end up at the border.”

Chance came to her rescue when she got there, he said, in the form of the man whose car she hit. He treated her kindly and took her to the port of entry to get assistance from officials there. “That was a remarkable coincidence in my mind,” Fish said. “She ran into somebody with morals, and he helped her. It could have been way worse.” She was back with her family that night.

For Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and their caregivers, living on the border comes with unique challenges