Last night The Squire went up to watch TV while I worked on the computer, transcribing minutes from a meeting. About a half an hour after he went up, he came back down to flop in the chair beside me and ask if I’d take his blood pressure. “My chest hurts and I’m having trouble breathing.”
Now, there’s a sentence that will make your blood run cold.
His B/P was high, but not horrendous, but I still recommended we trot off in the general direction of the local Doc in a Box. He thought maybe his problem was that he was overheated and dehydrated. The upstairs of our house can be absolutely tropical *, while the downstairs remains almost chilly. After he’d had a glass of water and rested a bit he decided he’d survive and wandered off to go to bed. I wasn’t too sure about it all, but trying to argue with a man is seldom worth the effort. I settled him in bed in the guest room with a glow-in-the-dark flashlight, a “sippy cup”, and a dinner bell, then went to bed in our room, leaving both doors open. Sometimes, it really makes sense that the medical abbreviation for Shortness of Breath is SOB. At any rate, the dear boy did survive the night, so all is well.
It tells you a fair amount of my life and my family that, when I married the Late and Unlamented, we received a silver dinner bell as a wedding gift. I let our eldest play with it when she was teething. The only time it ever gets used it when one of us is sick.
* When we first moved here, The Squire made a heat exchange system based on something we’d seen in Mother Earth News. He took a computer fan and attached it to a wooden “tube” about seven feet long. We installed it in the girls’ bedroom with the fan near the ceiling and the lower end just jutting through the dining room ceiling. When the temperature in their room hit 80° the fan would kick in and shoot the excess heat downstairs. Worked a treat, but when my parents gave us a longcase clock the only place to put it was in that corner and we didn’t want hot dry air blowing on the wood.
Changing the water filter on our pump is a major undertaking, and probably the most frustrating thing to be done at The Rice Paddy. The lines on both sides of the filter must be turned off, and then the housing must be unscrewed, and the old filter removed.
thisendoftheswamp 