Fire!

Saturday, December 2, 2007 about 3:00 p.m. I saw from my kitchen window smoke up at the house and called 911. A few seconds later Judy called and left a message on my machine telling me that the house was burning.

I couldn’t take pictures of the first fire. My batteries were drained from a trip to Florida a week earlier and I was too full of adrenaline after getting Judy's call to find fresh ones. I couldn’t have taken them anyway once I got there and saw...

photo by Priscilla Holcomb

The photos that follow are from 12/3/2007. The blurry, bluish ones were taken about 6:00 am. I called 911 to report smoke billowing out of the house. The Fire department responded and put it out.

Skeletal spruce. The ass't fire chief said her son got trapped when this tree went up in flames. She said he knew he was in trouble immediately and was really scared. He looked for his partner (firefighters work in pairs at all times for this reason) and realized that she had gotten to the other side of the tree just as it went up and didn't know what had happened. He figured his only way to survive was to kick the fence down. His partner realized quickly what had happened and from the other side, she helped him tear the fence down.

Here is the missing section of fence the firefighters tore down.

About 1:00 p.m. Shep, Charlie and Keith; and then I, a bit later, went up to the house. A new blaze broke out. By about 4:30 they had contained it finally.

[photos not uploaded yet]

Pink for October

Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

She's gone?

My friend/mentor/mother-figure/big sister/teacher died on June 1st. Putting it here makes it painfully real. I get waves of sorrow and grief. Unbidden.

I can't call D to tell her something monumental happened. Her being gone is the monumental thing that has happened.

She died on her husband's 77th birthday. Her last words were “happy birthday.”

She was 70.

I wish now I had saved her last phone message to me. But I erased it knowing I would talk to her again.

I don't know, I just...

Try it Without Breathing

The Greek word apnea, means literally “without breath.”

Too much of that can cause “without life.”

That is never good.

I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. I have been chronically exhausted for about a year. I have been depressed.

Not blue. Not suicidal. Not sad. More...flat. Nothing has much appeal. Spring came and went last year and I never noticed. Summer went by. I didn’t notice. Winter. And here we are again. Spring.

I dread it, mostly. Its damn insistence on re-birth and joy. Its moments of sun that send those around me into paroxysms of glee, hope, mirth. I just don’t care. It feels like an imposition. Buzz off. Don’t tell me I have to go out and play. I have no idea anymore why people do that. Play, I mean. I just don’t really care.

See? Depressed. Flat. I can see it. But I can’t will it away.

My friend SN, concerned about the change in me and my unrelenting lack of interest in anything, told me about her mother. She was “depressed.” Eventually doctors decided to do a sleep study and determined she had sleep apnea. She was treated for it and feels better. No more needing to pull off to the side of the road on the way home from work just to sleep.

People with untreated sleep apnea stop breathing, sometimes hundreds of times a night, often for minutes at a time. Again, I’m tellin’ ya, that is never good.

The brain, good ol’ brain, arouses one from sleep in order for them to breathe. Sleep is therefore fragmented and of poor quality. People rarely get to REM levels of restorative sleep or only get there for short periods of time.

No restorative sleep. Bad.

The neurologist who interpreted the data from my sleep study determined that I slept about 6 hours out of 8. Not because I was reading, or star-gazing, mind you, because my brain had to keep arousing me from sleep so I would breathe.

I was waked from sleep by said brain 178 times. Normal sleepers wake 5-7 times, although it’s not the sort of wakefulness that we remember.

I spent less than an hour in REM the entire night. Normal, restorative REM is 90-120 minutes per 8-ish hours of sleep a night.

So.

I get to wear one of these:













What has happened to me?

I'm listening to the tune "Perforated Sleep" by Leo Kottke from the album: Guitar Music

All I wanted, was to be good...

I'm listening to the tune "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" by Martha Wainwright from the album: Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole