Brown Water and Ribs

Last night, just after I got out of the shower, I heard a truck on the street in front of our house. "A tow truck," I told Ann at first when I saw the blinking yellow lights, but then realized a man in a hardhat was standing by the fire hydrant. A hardhat? What's with that? I sent Ann outside to check. I was in my pajamas. She wasn't.

Turns out it was the city flushing the fire hydrant system, something they do about once a year. Lucky us. The last time they flushed the system, we woke to brown water pouring from our spigots. "We're they going to tell us?" I asked Ann.

She huffed a laugh.

This morning she turned on the sprinkler system to run water through our pipes to make certain they were completely flushed before we made coffee, boiled water for our oatmeal, or filled our water bottles for the day. I was skeptical so I gathered yesterday's water bottles and poured them into the expensive espresso machine and found one of the many full glasses of water Ann tends to leave around (and never drink) to fill the pan for oatmeal.

Ann was brave. She took a shower. I ran the water just to see and it seemed fine, but then I looked in the toilet and saw the slightly yellow-brown water and had second thoughts.

This has been one blip in a blip-filled week. Ann's mother ended up in a Mexican hospital (she lives in Mexico) with a heart attack and all any of us can get in terms of "official" information comes from Ann's whack-a-doodle mother herself.

"I am fine," she told Ann on the phone this morning. "I just want to go home where Jose can take care of me." Jose is her 46 year old former convict boyfriend (she is 71). He speaks limited English and communicates only through email writing curt messages that give us no more information than we can gather from Momma Whack-a-doodle.

Debbie, Ann's sister, emailed today after talking to their mother. Genevieve (said mother) IS home despite the wishes of the hospital that wanted to keep her there until they got a better picture of how much damage was done and which medications she should take. But no, no, no, she wanted to go home because, in her own words, "they were trying to kill me!" She offered no specifics, but is going to "take a nap" and "eat some lunch" and she'll be fine. "I did not have a heart attack! I just need rest," she told Debbie.

Please.

Add to this, my own "chest pains" and my wandering blood pressure that shot up to 165/94 yesterday afternoon and bottomed out at 120/71 this morning.

I went to the doctor's office this morning. With their machinery, my blood pressure was more regular (a cautionary 134/80...pretty consistent for me) and still not in the "time to medicate" range. "Stop using that blood pressure machine at home," my doctor advised. "It just stresses you out and for no reason."

"The chest pains?" I asked.

"You are very fit. That you could climb a mountain yesterday and breathe easily means your heart is not suffering."

And then she felt my chest, the place right in the center, above my breasts where my ribs meet.

"Ouch!"

"I think you've dislocated a rib," she told me and then advised me to see "Dr. Dan" the office chiropractor who, lo and behold, had an open appointment.

Sure enough, I coughed myself into a popped rib.

"That must have been a mighty cough," Dr. Dan commented.

"8 weeks of mighty," was my only response.

After a few adjustments, I feel much better. The prescription? A few more adjustments and an order to "stop sleeping on your right side!"

That will be hard to do. I love sleeping on my right side, but clearly it aggravates the rib and the inflammation around the rib -- I wake every morning with a burning sensation in my chest that lasts the whole day and makes my blood pressure roller coaster as I think I'm having a heart attack. I'm also supposed to stretch, take an anti-inflammatory, and ice three times a day.

And I thought the falling stock market was my biggest worry.

What a full moon it's been. I think I'll go have a drink of brown water.