The Sound of Water

In May, I sent my boss this email:

Hello!

I just had quite a long visit on my unit (transplant) with a patient a nurse referred me to. The patient’s affect was relentlessly flat, and he did not seem to have nurturing relationships in his life, or activities that bring him joy. I know “depression” is a clinical  term beyond my purview, so I just said in my note that he seemed downcast and I noted what I said above. I said to a nurse that I thought maybe he could use a psych evaluation, and the nurse said, “I’ll text his doctor and tell him the chaplain thinks he needs a psych evaluation.”

Nice to be taken so seriously!

My boss wrote back, “Good work, including the word ‘downcast’!”

Tom and I drove a Zipcar to Sacramento to visit Ann on Mother’s Day and to see her new place (and for me to meet her newish dog). We had a lovely lunch in the community’s elegant dining room, and Ann made a stunningly generous contribution to my street retreat.

May 15, 2019, is a day that will long live in (my) memory. The first part of it was routine. I rode my bike to work and kibitzed with my colleagues and saw patients. In the afternoon, we had a meeting at another campus, so I rode my bike over there and discovered that a cage had been installed around the bike racks in the parking garage. I tried my badge and it didn’t seem to unlock the cage door, but the parking attendant told me to pull the door open, and sure enough, it opened.

Our interim director gave us a presentation on patients with mental illness. A couple of us did a role play, trying out what we’d just learned. Then we had a team meeting, and, just when the day would normally have ended, I got a page about an emergency back at my normal campus. I considered whether to ride my bike back over there and then cycle home, or whether to take a cab there and back, and then ride my bike home from where it was currently parked. I don’t mind cycling in the rain (I’m not saying I love it), but strong winds were also forecast, so I decided to take a cab.

I saw the patient and her family (and discovered that we don’t have after-hours priest coverage at the new hospital), and then I called a cab to go back to where my bike was. It took 56 minutes to get a cab—and then it turned out that my badge really, truly didn’t open that cage. I called security and, fortunately, there were a few parking people hanging around that campus. One of them came and opened the bike cage and I rolled home. I got home three and a half hours later than usual.

I did my normal evening stuff. At some point, it dawned on me that I’d been hearing running water for quite some time. I remembered the words of a friend of mine who also once upon a time listened to running water in her apartment building for quite some time and learned from that experience never to ignore this sound. I called Tom, in the apartment above mine, to inquire, and he said that he had flushed his toilet 45 minutes earlier and it had never stopped running. He had just had a new valve installed a few weeks earlier. These are old-fashioned toilets with no tank (but plenty of water pressure, as I was minutes from discovering). He said he would let the building manager know in the morning.

However, the noise was not insignificant, so I said I would text her. She wrote back instantly to tell me to tell Tom to take “the cap” off and try shutting the valve for a minute and re-opening it. I passed this on to Tom and I heard him in his bathroom, and then I heard a grunt of dismay followed by the sound, perhaps, of a wrench falling on the tile floor. “Something has gone wrong,” I thought, and one second later, water began pouring down my bathroom window, and then coming right through the ceiling.

I called the building manager back and at first she said, “Go up there and see if you can help him,” but I said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. There is water pouring down into my bathroom, and hallway, and kitchen,” and she said to go turn the water for the whole building off, and gave us instructions. Her husband helped us.

Tom’s place was engulfed in water, mainly the floor, and my place had water gushing down from the ceiling, and raining through three light fixtures, in the bathroom, by the front door, and in the kitchen. The glass covering for the light fixture in the bathroom, which was pretty large, filled entirely with urine-colored water. (Fortunately, this actually was clean water raining down, not sewage, but the building is ancient, and was getting a thorough interior rinse.) I put a bucket under the light fixture in my front hallway, and it filled completely with pitch-black water.

It was a wet, yucky night, with one towel after the other getting soaked. There was a terrible smell. The water went from my place down into that of the building manager below me, soaking her light fixtures and ceiling and walls, and thenceforth into the basement. (Which we figured might be good: the place is porous. Better than having water sit in one place indefinitely.) The hallway outside Tom’s place got really drenched, and there was water raining down outside my front door, too.

I called my father, and though it was well into the wee hours in Michigan, he kindly listened to my initial report, and several reports after that.