Paranoid 3: Betting our hedge

The roof of our former house narrowly missed the car across the street. Photo by: Jennifer Oberhammer

Looking back over the past five less-than-stellar years has me thinking about luck. Most of us think in terms of bad luck and good luck.

I don't think it's that simple. There's good-great luck and there's good-could-have-been-much-worse luck.

An example of the former is having the winning lottery numbers. When I think of the latter, I think of a scenario like this:

A woman gets dragged under a bus for a mile or so and then is set upon by a pack of feral dogs, but is still alive. The newscaster reports that she's in a medically induced coma while awaiting a donor for a full-body skin transplant. The cop featured on the five-second sound bite says, "That's one lucky little lady."

I'd say that's my kind of luck, but I'm luckier because I have all my skin--and teeth. And we got out of there, by the skin of our teeth.

So far, I've recounted major house damage and then heart damage. Then, there were the scabies-that-turned-out-to-be bed bugs and the therapeutic demolition job.

Next up we have real estate snafus, lice and a tornado. But there I go again, rushing things.

When I left off, we were engaged in a full out war against bed bugs. For months, we watched each other carefully for any rashes or bite-like lesions. I felt like a scout for the porn industry: "Take your clothes off and stand over here." And that was just for guests.

And the nightmares! In the dead of night, I'd go from a twitchy prone position to standing with all the bedding in my hands and the light on in 1.2 seconds. It wasn't long before Oli stopped asking what I was doing. He'd just wait until I was good and ready to hand the sheets back.

Bed bugs and beyond

After a year, we were in the clear. Not one to just sit back and enjoy some free time, I started advocating to move. I wanted to live in a house where I didn't have so many bad memories. Not that all memories were bad. I'd brought home my two (colicky) infants from the hospital to that--. Yeah, now that you mention it, there weren't a lot of good memories, plus we were running out of room to store all the sports equipment we couldn't use, now that we were parents.

I found the perfect place, just blocks away. We put an offer on the house and it was accepted. In a divine stroke of luck, acquaintances expressed interest in our place.

But of course, when your last name is Murphy, things rarely work out the way you think they will. After we signed off on our home inspection, our inspector's "just-in-case insulation test" for asbestos came back positive. I wanted out of that purchase in a big, bad way. But the vendors were really great about it and got it removed and replaced, largely at their expense.

The home inspection on our place didn't go so well either and we had to pay for some big expenses there.

What's a life event without bugs? This time it was lice and all of us were afflicted. The treatment and the moving stress had me flirting with female-pattern baldness.

Hegemony (Phonetics: Hedge-eh-money)

The universe wasn't done with us yet though. The purchaser's lawyer had hedge issues with our place.

Our hedge's proximity to a property line had our sale teetering on the edge of oblivion. It was the most confounding situation and I can't get into details here because I fear angering the gods of property and libel law.

Our legal fees quadrupled, while my mental faculties halved.

My and Oli's parents swooped in as I unraveled. I could neither eat nor sleep because I felt so responsible for our impending financial ruin.

In the midst of all this, there were layoffs at work and I was called to an unscheduled meeting. As I walked down the hall, pondering rules for filing bankruptcy, I was ushered into the "survivors'" meeting and I almost fainted with relief.

Hedge-ectomy

Our lawyer hit on a solution at the 11th hour, which involved a night-time visit with a chainsaw and a headlamp. Oli's hedge removal was masterful. When he was done, there was no evidence that a 12-foot hedge had ever been there.

It really did work out in the end. I loved our new house from the first, but I could tell that my husband was a bit "meh" about the cost, the big mortgage and stress of the move.

But five months later, he developed a whole new appreciation for our abode.

The April after we moved in, a tornado stampeded through the old neighbourhood and tore the roof clean off our former house and deposited it in the middle of the road.

I'm sure the neighbours across the road were cursing us for upping the "R" value of the roof insulation because it looked like their giant maple tree was part of a pink ribbon campaign.

I felt so badly for our purchasers; what a beginning for their new home. I thought a fresh start would change the luck of the place. They've recently moved back in and much like us, I'm sure they have a whole new appreciation for home insurance.

That house could really do with a dose of good luck. An end to the bad luck would be a good start.

Now, I feel pressure behind my right eye. I wonder if it's a tumour.

Just because the universe is out to get me, doesn’t mean I’m paranoid (Part 1)

I do have a tendency to wallow in negativity, but I’m hoping that discovering my own divine goodness will change all that. Meditation is supposed to be the vehicle to get me there, but it's stalled on the Lazy Highway at the junction of Excess and Sleeplessness at the moment.

I’m staring down the end of 2009 and wondering what 2010 has in store for me. An attitude adjustment would be a good move for me in 2010.

But before I go that route, I’m going to wallow in negativity one more time and then flush. (Actually, this is such a long post, that I may cut it into two or three posts).

If I had tunnel vision, I would be inclined to say that the last five years were a complete write-off. There were tough times and there were (paltry) good times. I should add a disclaimer of sorts saying: "I'm aware that I'm very fortunate to be born into the time and circumstances I'm in."

But since this is my last (multi-part) wallow, I’m going to highlight the low points for my reading audience. Right off the bat, I have to say that sometimes when things really suck they can be funny later. But some things just keep right on sucking.

Roof and heart: 2005/6

We returned home from our Christmas holidays to a terrible smell. I thought that perhaps we forgot to take the garbage out, but that wasn’t it.

When I walked into our living room, the ceiling was hanging down. The roofer took that old roof off, but didn’t get around to putting the new roof on and it rained while we were away.

This house was a three storey semi-detached home with a flat roof. I was home when they were removing the tar and gravel. I had assumed they were putting on the membrane to replace it, but they didn’t. Lacking a 50-foot ladder, I couldn’t confirm this. That was my mistake.

We spent the next seven weeks in a depressing little furnished apartment while the roofer’s insurance company and our insurance company funded the replacement of all of our ceilings and the floor refinishing and replacement. Thank heavens for insurance. We paid for the actual roof replacement when it was done and had our home inspector verify it.

The night we moved back in, my older daughter, who was four at the time, vomited all over her room from the overwhelming smell of varnish. My younger daughter, who was two (and who is the melded reincarnation of a goat and a science geek), wrote on some walls, broke into her sister’s piggy bank and dropped coins down the vents to give it that lived-in look. There. Perfect.

About six weeks later, my 37-year-old husband walked gingerly down the stairs from the office, where he had been entering his students’ marks.

He was clutching his chest.

“I have crushing chest pain. Can hardly breathe.”

Following the ambulance carrying my husband was surreal. This is something that happens to other people. All I kept thinking was: How could he have a heart attack? He’s a sub-three-hour marathoner, non-smoker and has the healthiest diet of anyone I know.

At the hospital, they ran tests and kept him overnight.

When I returned home where my neighbour and friend was minding my children, he told me that my older daughter’s asthma was acting up, so he gave her the “puffer”. A father himself to children with allergies, he was adept in assessing these things and administering her puffer.

I took her temperature and it was 104F. Not up to another trip to the emergency, but not feeling very tired, I gave her some ibuprophen, propped her up on me and administered salbutamol in intervals for what remained of the night.

I fetched Oli the next day. Tests revealed that he hadn’t had a heart attack. We were so relieved and regarded his followup tests with the internist as a precautionary measure.

Oli laughed and joked with the technicians as he sailed through the stress test. It was inconceivable that he’d fail the test. He returned home ebullient, but very tired. Hours later, the doctor called him up and said he wanted to see him first thing in his office.

That was our introduction the term peri-myocarditis. The doctor figured that it was brought on by a virus Oli had two or three weeks prior. Oli was over the bug, but just couldn’t shake the fatigue. But he didn’t let that stop him from riding his bike to work (in February), working out, coaching the basketball team and participating in exercise labs with his Grade 12 physiology students.

The pain he felt that night was from sudden swelling of the heart muscle (myocardium) and its membrane (pericardium).

Looking back now, I feel that this situation may have arisen from another factor in addition to the virus, and that’s chemical. We moved back into our home in winter time after the floors had been sanded and varnished and the walls re-painted. It’s not practical to keep the windows open for long periods of time when its -20C.

Lucky for us that we live in a place where we can access a heart-specialty hospital. Oli was put in the care of a cardiologist at the Ottawa Heart Institute.

And so went the rounds of tests and appointments. During this time, my daughter’s asthma was poorly controlled, and it seemed that when I wasn’t going to the heart institute or emergency with my husband, I was at the family doctor’s or the emergency department of the Children’s Hospital for Eastern Ontario with my daughter.

Oli was exhausted and grey and slept a lot. I worked, went to appointments and did as much as I could around the house. The girls went to daycare, as they had before. This tore at my husband, who felt that while he was home, he should at least be able to take care of his children. Not possible with his level of illness.

I remember Halloween that year. Oli was too weak to take the girls out, so he gave out candy—seated on a chair on our porch because he was too weak to stand up.

Happy Valentine’s Day—welcome to heart failure

Valentine’s Day 2006 was another low point. My husband's cardiologist, during an earlier appointment said that he was referring my husband to a "colleague". That actual reason is hazy but it was something like "making sure all the bases are covered."

Our appointment was Valentine's Day and when we arrived to meet our new doctor we found out that he was a HEART FAILURE AND TRANSPLANT SPECIALIST and we were there because Oli's heart damage was looking permanent.

Those were more frightening times. Our doctor was very reassuring, but still, Oli was trying to adjust to the fact that he couldn't trust his heart.

His heart was something he took for granted before. Now it thumped ineffectively like a big water balloon in his chest. Irregular heart rhythms woke him in the night and he was plagued with constant chest pain. At least his function wasn't so bad that he was on the transplant list.

Eventually, Oli felt well enough to teach one class a day, and so he did. He walked when he felt well enough and rested a lot. He spent every waking moment cuddling his little girls, fearful that he wouldn't be around to see them grow up.

Watching him go through that made me feel powerless. What's the saying about wishes being fishes? I wished that if he couldn't magically be cured, that I could at least hand him my heart and say, "Why don't we share and alternate weeks?"

See also:

Part 2: Scabies seem appealing

Part 3: Betting our Hedge