Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Shawn's boss told him to take all the time off that he needed to take care of things here at home. I was very grateful; I needed him here. He was home for a week, cleaning the house out and basically directing everyone that came to help. I was no use to anyone.
When my in-laws were here, they brought a queen sized air bed for us. Shawn and I were able to at least sleep in the same room again; he on the air bed, me on the regular bed. (He moves around too much, and every time he did, he'd bump me right off the air bed!) We stayed that way for 6 weeks, until someone gave us a mattress and box springs.
Monday and Tuesday people came to help get more stuff out of the house and garage. A youth group from a church we don't even go to came out and cleaned things like dishes and "stuff". I remember someone trying to clean the boys building blocks; you know, the Mega Blocks? Yeah. Soot won't come off of those. I told them to throw them away.
You know, smoke doesn't discriminate. Heat doesn't, either. I had a desk top computer in the kitchen, on the other side of the house from the fire. There was also a laptop computer, on the floor, not 4 feet from the actual flames (there was a chair between the flames and the computer.) Can you guess which one survived the fire? The laptop! The desktop, because it was plugged in and because it was above the floor on a desk, fried. The laptop was on the floor, under the smoke and not plugged in.
Our wedding album was in a utility sink that we used for storing stuff; we never ran the water in it. It totally survived.
My oldest son, Noah, was in a loft bed that night. I'm convinced that if his bedroom door had been open and not closed, he wouldn't be with us today; he would have perished from smoke inhalation. He was so high up, close to the ceiling. There was an Ikea shelving unit under his bed that we stored toys on. When it was taken out of the house, Shawn scraped a sticker off of it. This it what he saw:
We called this picture "Beauty from Ashes".
We lost everything in our attic. Our Christmas decorations and ornaments I had been collecting for 13 years were all gone. When the restorers were up in the attic, they were told to just throw away what they found. I didn't want to see it. When I went down there one day to get the mail and check on things (that became my daily routine) one guy came out with this in his hands:
I didn't have any Santa decorations in my home but this one. It was the only Christmas decoration that we found. Thing is, now it's disappeared. We have NO idea where it is, to this day!
Let's switch gears here a little, now, shall we?
After the fire, I didn't sleep. I was fine during the day, but when the sun went down, I wasn't. It was as if I had to stay awake to protect everyone else. My Mom's dryer had an alarm that would buzz when the clothes were done; I had to make her turn it off, because it sounded too much like the smoke alarms. It scared me every time. She also has an upright freezer that was malfunctioning, and it too had an alarm that sounded like the smoke alarms. Unfortunately, we couldn't turn that one off, and it would go off in the middle of the night.
Between those things and no sleep, I was jumpier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
I finally went to the doctor. I told her what had happened, and that I wasn't sleeping. I thought I needed sleeping medicine. I'd been given Ambien when I was pregnant, so I figured they'd just give me that. She told me I was wrong. Oh, the sleeping pills would put me to sleep, yes, but I would wake back up. She told me that I was suffering from anxiety.
Anxiety? Me? Are you sure?
It was almost like PTSD. She prescribed some anti-anxiety meds and anti-depressants (this was before my discovery of essential oils!) and sent me home with instructions to rest as much as possible.
Riiiiiiight.
...to be continued, again...
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