Saga -- Part Four

It was about 7 a.m. when we left the hospital. My wife drove the car out of the parking ramp onto Thompson Street, then turned left onto Grand Avenue. The sun was about to rise, but it might as well have been midnight. Sheets of rain were hitting the windshield. As she prepared to turn from Grand Avenue onto Smith, my phone let out an alert.

“What’s that?” my wife asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve never heard my phone do that before. Let me look.”

It was a warning from the National Weather Service – Ramsey County was under an urban and small stream flood warning. A severe thunderstorm was moving through the area. Heavy rain would fall throughout Ramsey County and localized flooding was possible.

I thought about our house, about 20 minutes away. While it's been a mostly beautiful summer, we’d had a number of torrential rain storms over the course of the year and water had overwhelmed our gutters and downspouts, causing a small amount of water to leak into the basement. We’d been able to avoid major damage, but this storm didn’t look promising. We are getting things repaired, but the problem remained.

“We’ll have to see what things look like when we get home,” I said. "I hope the gutters aren’t overflowing.”

The rain and the regular rush hour traffic turned a 20-minute drive into a 45-minute slog. As we arrived home, we could see that water was coming over the gutters, but just a trickle. The rain was coming to an end, though.

“Looks like we dodged a bullet,” I said. “I’ll have to check the gutters later on, but we need to get some rest.”

Neither of us had slept since the previous morning, so we were exhausted. We went to sleep. By this point, the medication I'd received from the hospital had kicked in and my blood pressure had returned to normal levels. I was breathing deeply and freely. About three hours later, it was 11 a.m. and the phone rang. It was the heart clinic -- they wanted to see me at 3:30 that afternoon for a consultation with a cardiologist. I wrote down the information and headed back to bed.

Not 20 minutes later, I could hear thunder and heavy rain. I put on some workout clothes and looked outside the front window of the house. Water was coming over the gutter -- a lot of water.

A few days before, we had set out a series of containers in front of our house to catch any rain water that had come over the roof. The containers were full and the water was starting to splash on the landscaping in front of our house. I grabbed the ladder from the garage, climbed up the ladder and looked up into the gutter. It was filled with water and leaves from our ash tree. I tried to fish out some of the leaves from the gutter, which helped a bit, then I carried the ladder to the downspout area on the end of the garage. The downspout was filled with leaves as well. I fished out what I could from there, all the while getting soaked by the rain, which was coming down in sheets. 

I put the ladder aside, then grabbed a pail from the garage and started bailing the water out of the plastic storage containers that were catching some, but not all, of the water. I filled the pail about 20 times and tossed the water out onto the lawn, bailing water like I would if I were on a leaking boat. That helped somewhat, but it wasn't a promising way to start my recovery. The rain started to slow a bit and I got somewhat ahead of the water that was pouring over the roof line. After about 10-15 minutes of this, the rain started to slow.

I went back into the house and turned on the computer to check the local radar. We had a brief respite, but more rain was coming. I grabbed a tarp and tried to rig up a barrier in front of the house, but the wind was howling and made it almost impossible to keep anything in place.

About 20 minutes passed and the second wave of rain came in -- this time, a torrential downpour. It took only a minute for the water to start coming over the roofline again and splashing all over the front of our house. I tried to hold up the tarp to keep the water from flowing back toward the house, but it was too much. By then, my wife had awoken and understood what was happening. She came out and helped me to hold up the tarp, but the water kept coming.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, we received over an inch of rain, part of a total of about 3 inches of rain that we would receive that day. We alternated between trying to keep the water out and bailing what had collected in the storage containers. We could see that water was getting into the window well behind us, so we bailed out that water as well. Some water would get into the basement, but we managed to forestall disaster.

Finally, the rain slowed. We were drenched and exhausted. I had feared I was having a heart attack less than 12 hours before, and now I was still standing, drenched, but alive.

A little bit of water had dripped through the window well into our family room. We also had a little bit of water in the back playroom. A short session with a ShopVac would clean it up. The rain was over and the storm had moved on.

After I pulled off my wet clothes, I posted a cryptic message on Facebook:

A fair number of people who read that post were puzzled by what I meant. Now you know. 

About 90 minutes later, I was able to drive myself to my appointment with my new friend, the cardiologist. He told me about the stress test he was scheduling for me. I will take that test in a few days from now. I have little doubt that the stress my heart will receive from the test will not be any greater than what I had experienced. Bring it on.