Oxygen

I love my old house. God knows I do. But sometimes funny stuff happens with old houses. One of them happened last night.

I woke up around 4:30 or so feeling rather restless and jumpy. I then started feeling vaguely nauseous. I got up around an hour later to go take a walk thinking that the morning air might make me feel better. It actually made me feel worse and caused me to throw up. "Great. "I thought. " I've caught a bug." But as I sat in my chair I noticed a smell and I wondered, "Do I have a gas leak?"

Centerpoint had a guy out here by 8:30. He confirmed my suspicions and cut off the meter. The plumber came out and located the source of the leak: the wall heater in the master bathroom some 8 feet from where I lay my little head. Great. Good thing I don't smoke. I would have woke up in Kansas.

The plumber says that it won't be too bad of a job. They've just got to pressure test it before the city can authorize Centerpoint to come back out and hook me up. He says he thinks it will run around 500 bucks. Fine. Whatever. Just fix the damn thing.

The doctor's office said that there are 2 things of which we can be thankful: 1) That I have a "reactive body." I guess by this they mean that when the oxygen levels in my blood started dropping I woke up rather than, well, died. And 2) That there were no small children in the house. 8 hours of LP gas might have killed a little kid.

In any event, they said to rest up and let the gases get out of my system and to take tylenol for the headache.

As one of my "friends" said, "Looks like you have once again cheated the untimely death we have all predicted for you."

Yeah. Looks like.

It's a good thing that I don't smoke. It's a good thing I have a "reactive body." It's a good thing that one of my nephews wasn't spending the night.

And it's an awfully good thing to be typing this from my porch swing rather than from a hyperbaric chamber somewhere.