You rarely read a story about a heart procedure that is funny. So here you go.
Sis and I share a house so it wasn’t hard for me to notice the day she needed the EMTs. They hustled her out without dropping her even once. The ER doc realized that she was very sick, indeed. (Note: The local ER has been getting a lot of flak lately, but I must say they did everything possible to make a miserable situation a livable one.)
Sis was transported to St. Michael’s in Silverdale by another ambulance, driven by a lovely dude who talked to her the whole way. I believe she is now godmother to one of his children. Bless him for the comfort to a frightened elder.
Within days she had a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure where they introduce a new valve into an old heart. Talk about your miracles.
But that’s where this story goes a bit wonky.
I am in the hospital on a miserably modern chair, anxiously awaiting results of the delicate lifesaving procedure, when my phone rings. It is our renter who lives on our home’s lower level. He says the furnace is making a terrible noise. He does not know, of course, I am not upstairs but in Silverdale. With little else to do but worry, I call Dave’s who gets a service person there ASAP.
However! The Renter does not have a key to the upstairs where the thermostat is. So I tell Renter (and Dave’s Guy) I will direct them by phone on how to worm their way into the inner sanctum.
“First, go down to the basement,” I say to Renter, then suggest this is where women in movies always don negligees and wander unarmed through a spooky mansion.
He does not appreciate my suggestion, but plows ahead. They enter the dark bowels of the house I refer to as the Spider Room.
“Walk straight ahead through the creaky door.” Now Renter and Dave’s Guy are inside a totally dark closet. Their only aid is Dave’s Guy’s penlight.
“Go up the stairs … yes, they are rickety … keep going … now open the folding doors.”
It is at this point I remember I have two dogs locked inside the house. Dotty’s worst fear is that a male stranger will one day appear in the house. And it has happened. Except it is two strangers.
Dotty, Renter and Dave’s Guy will never recover from the shock of the encounter.
Jinx, on the other hand, is a jolly sort of mutt who has a good laugh as they all inch their way down the murky hall to the thermostat.
Eventually, the furnace heats and the heart beats, so the endings for both adventures are happy ones. I am eternally grateful to everyone in this story.
Even the crazy person who owned our house long before us … the guy who installed a hidden stairway so he could creep down to the basement to smoke a secret cigar.
Linda B. Myers has authored 10 novels available locally and on Amazon. In June, she will publish a collection of her articles from the Sequim Gazette. You can reach her at myerslindab@gmail.com.
