Lessons from a Fire🔥🔥
Imagine being waken from your sleep to someone in your house screaming “DADDY, GET THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER, THE TABLE IN MY ROOM IS ON FIRE”…. You run out your room to see a real life fire in your house. Now fires are no joke! Not only did the fumes smell terrible, it was hot, smokey, terrifying, and that shit was a pain in the ass to put out. Oh BTW the fire extinguisher wasn’t operable.
Everyone in the house rushed to the room to help. One grabbed the fire extinguisher which we found out in the moment didn’t work, one grabbed the mop bucket to fill with water, the other two grabbed gallon bottles of water to throw on the fire. The table fire went out after that first round, but the box of stuff underneath the table was also on fire. That one was stubborn. There was a Playstation in it, so it would not go out as easily. It took several trips of water and a wet towel to finally get it out.
What tf just happened?! It was barely 5am. We went out on the patio to catch some fresh air. My mother was not okay. She was so in shock, she kept asking over and over again what just happened. We tried to get her to stay outside while the house aired out but she just wouldn’t sit still. We opened all the windows in the house.
After a while we noticed she kept asking and saying the same thing over and over again. It almost felt like talking to my grandmother who struggles with shirt-term memory loss. I suddenly felt like I was living a nightmare. Something wasn’t right. We tried to make a trip to the ER to get ourselves checked, but she refused to go anywhere. All attempts to get her to drink water, eat, take her pressure meds, none of it worked. It was like we were living the same 30 seconds over and over again for HOURS. So much things happened in between that I won’t bore you with the details of, but shit got real for us that day. Words can’t even explain. I must admit that I am truly blessed to have had my two sisters flying in that day. Having them around LITERALLY saved me.
Long story short, one of my brother-in-laws was finally able to get her to eat some food and she snapped out of it. This was almost 13 hours later…. Of course she has no recollection of anything that happened that morning, but she was able to recall what she did the day before, that her meds were actually hers, and that she sold the dining room table a while back (these were all things she denied/didn’t remember during the episode).
So, like I usually do when bizarre shit happens in my life, I looked for the lessons or higher purpose and here is what I got:
Do not burn candles 🕯 at night or leave them burning for an extended time especially when you’re likely to fall asleep, even if the candle is almost done.
Make sure you check the fire extinguishers 🧯in your house to confirm that they are ready to operate when you need them.
The human brain is sooo sensitive. We have to make sure we pay attention to the health of our brain 🧠. I’ll be posting more on this topic for sure.
Everything is truly better when you have a community. Like imagine if there wasn’t a crew of us tackling that fire. Shit would have gone south really quick. Having my family around during such a horrifying time really made all the difference. I am forever grateful to have them 💚.
I’ve been feeling the pull to write for a while now, and this experience has also helped to push me to just do it. I hope that this will be helpful to someone out there. Actually, I know it is.
See you in my next post! Xoxo
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