Too much excitement

Last week in my house was filled with excitement, the bad kind.  On Friday my husband felt faint, got up from his computer chair, went into the dining room, and passed out, with a monumental crash.  Fortunately I was in the studio, not at the grocery store, and thus was able to summon the ambulance and get him to the hospital.

By that time his heart was slowing down, then stopping for as long as six seconds, then restarting itself to do the same thing over again.  Clearly that was what had happened to cause the fall and the crash, and the remedy was an immediate temporary pacemaker, followed by a permanent pacemaker on Monday.  Now he just has to heal up and he will be considerably better than he was a week ago, no more worries about passing out from slow heartbeat.

I wish I could say the same for the house.  When he fell, he put two spectacular dents in the wall, but fortunately none of the dozen pictures on that wall came down, otherwise we would have had a near-death body covered in shards of glass.

Then two nights later as I was just home from a long day at the hospital, I turned the corner into our front hallway and realized something was wrong.  What was it?  I realized it was the beautiful wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror at the far end.  Instead of being vertical, it was tilted, and my reflection looked like it was going downhill.  

Turns out the mirror had detached itself from the wall and fallen forward for six inches, until it encountered the molding around the front door.  

When my handy sons inspected the scene of the crime the next day, they realized that the mirror had been "secured" only by two little clips at the bottom edge, nothing at the top edge (where there is a half-inch clearance, not a lot but enough to have installed some other kind of fastener).  

Had it been glued to the wall and just this week decided to let loose?  Had my husband stumbled against it on his way to collapsing in the dining room?  Had the EMTs stumbled against it while humping his limp body out the front door?  There were no handprints or smudges anywhere on the mirror, so probably it did its thing without human intervention.   Had it been a disaster waiting to happen ever since the house was built in 1963?

One of the handy sons brought over an industrial-strength tension rod -- think spring-loaded curtain rod, but tightened with a lever handle.  Suitable for jacking up sagging roofs and punching holes in concrete.  He pushed the mirror back against the wall, padded the bulging places on the tension rod with a pool noodle and installed it in front of the mirror.  Now we are safe, I hope, till we can get a guy in to fix the holes in the wall and affix the mirror more securely this time.

Never a dull moment.  By the way, the patient is doing well, although it's going to take a while.