Last night was a perfect example of how compromised my health truly is… [View all]

As most here on DU know, I have severely challenged breathing issues. I need supplemental Oxygen just to be able to walk around the house. As the wind and rain stared to howl around our house, rattling the windows, naturally culling the dead branches out of our trees, the power started to stutter.

Nothing terrible, just a little unnerving since we have a full wall of windows facing due north.

However, at around 11:00, the power started to stutter. Every fifteen minutes or so, the power would shut down and come right back, usually as close to immediately as possible.

At first, I thought it was the connection between the house and the grid since our intake wiring comes right through two trees. Since our development was built back in the early 50’s, our wires are still strung while almost every other development it has underground wires.

When I took a look outside, the only outdoor sign visible from our house and saw that it was flickering on the same schedule.

Now every time the lights flickered, my Oxygen machine would sputter and then let out a screeching sound that would scare off a grave robber. And since the everything was flickering, the internet was almost impossible to use and the cable, well we gave up.

So we were left mostly in the dark with a screeching O2 machine and a static filled portable radio.

Now I do have an emergency tank that holds close to 50 hours of O2. But if something really drastic happened, I didn’t want to use up the back-up tank.

MrsWCGreen put some earplugs in and went to bed. Me, well, I just laid there trying to read as the howling wind, the pelting rain was punctuated with the screech of the O2 machine. It last all the way till about 7:30AM.