We had a little fire here last night. We had been negligent in keeping the stove clean and something underneath the burners caught on fire. I would sometimes wonder about cleaning out the space underneath the drip pans but would just wipe out what I could see and leave it at that. Clearly that was not enough and having lapsed on even that level of clean-up for a little while, we had allowed for a very effective accumulation of kindling under our burners.
But we didn’t do everything wrong. One thing we did right was buying a fire extinguisher and keeping it under the kitchen sink. When I bought it, I thought it was silly. I spent $25 on this thing that nobody ever really uses, right?! The way this fire worked, if we hadn’t had the extinguisher we would have lost more than the stove, maybe a lot more.
PLEASE. Get a fire extinguisher. Know how to use it. Know where it is. I’m so dead serious about this. We could have lost our house. Seconds count in these situations. When Jt pulled out the fire extinguisher, he didn’t know how to use it. He read the instructions but the trigger is pretty hard to push so it took a few seconds to figure out. If it hadn’t worked, if the trigger had broken off (I read about this happening to someone) we may have run out of time before we figured out what to do next.
Buy an extinguisher. They have them on Amazon. They have them at hardware stores.

These are the different types of extinguishers, click the picture to go to the full article at HomeMinders.com
*****
So. That happened.
And really, everything’s fine. FINE. We are safe, we did all the right things and everyone is okay. But I’m not. I have PTSD and it has never been more obvious to me than it is today. I know that it has fucked with me in a million awful ways over the years but it never really made sense. I guess I was so used to being messed up in some way that it didn’t much matter what you called it. Plus, it was always a condition. It was, “Hey, you have depression and anxiety and -for a short time there- bipolar 2 and you have those things because you have PTSD (and PTSD is a bitch).”
But last night was scary. For Jt it was scary. For me it was a little more than scary. And that makes sense. It’s not unexpected that when something a little scary happens, it might feel a little more scary for me than what other people might feel in the same situation. I just didn’t expect it to feel this overwhelming and… BIG. I thought I would sleep it off last night, I was sure of it. But I didn’t. I remained this weird mix of numb and nauseated and hyperventilating and and… and
My belly is full of rocks and my diaphragm is pressing up into my lungs.
I don’t know how long this will last. I only have a few clonazepam left and can’t see my psychiatrist for another week. So just hand over the meds and we’ll get through this together.
























