The forecast was in the 80s. Miles had tutoring and wouldn't have any homework. I was tired and looking for an easy evening. So I made the classic mom plan - pizza at the pool. No dinner to make or clean up. Kids would come home tired and we would roll straight into bedtime.
At 3pm, I showed up at the kids school. Philip wanted to practice drums while Miles did tutoring. There was a book fair so we hit that up and Miles got a new Dogman book for showing so much growth and responsibility in recent weeks. We headed to the car and I told him the plan for swimming and pizza. He was 100% for it. If Miles was for it, getting everyone else would be easy.
We stopped at home and changed into swimsuits, grabbed some towels and headed right back out the door to pick up the pizza and Zander from daycare. We got Zander and stopped at Domino's. Then I realized, I forgot Zanders swimsuit. Annoyed with myself, I turned back to the house and quickly ran to get Zander's swimsuit.
It was nearing 5 o clock by the time I was headed to the club. I passed through an intersection and saw an ambulance hauling a ways down the road. As I continued, i could see that it had turned and was coming full steam behind me. I pulled over to let it pass. As I watched it plow through intersections ahead, I wondered how much faster are they able to travel? How many life saving minutes do they gain? That ambulance looked like it was in a movie the way it was moving.
As I arrived at the gym, I was in the left turn lane to turn in when a firetruck pulled up out of nowhere and turned in ahead of me. There were three ambulances and two firetrucks and other vehicles arriving. It took me a second to process what I was seeing and adjust.
I pulled forward and turned around in the church parking lot adjacent to the club. People were putting cones out across the clubs driveway. With that many vehicles I speculated that something must have happened with the pool. This was too big of a response for a medical emergency in the gym. But what could it be? The building wasn't on fire.
Whatever it was, we weren't swimming today. I prayed the whole way home. That was a lot of vehicles. As soon as we got home, I checked local Facebook groups. Usually things like this get a thread going pretty quick. I also checked email to see if the club has sent any messages like "The rec pool will be closed for the rest of the afternoon. " It was a warm day and usually there's a pretty big crowd on evenings like this.
Nothing.
I passed out pizza and the kids fell into playing. I flopped on the couch. I checked Facebook again. A thread had started but no real info yet. Finally after 45 minutes or so, people who had been there added some light details. From what I could piece together, there was some sort of pipe break that caused chlorine gas to bubble into the pool and some people were exposed to it and at last 3 were hospitalized. The details aren't formally released and maybe this isn't entirely accurate.
But still...
If I had remembered Zander's swimsuit I might be writing this post from a hospital room - my own or one of my kids. Had we been there 15 minutes earlier we would have been right in the middle of the incident whatever it was.
Life is fragile. Our human bodies are fragile.
Chlorine combined with sodium is salt we need to live. Chlorine free in the air turns into acid when we breathe it in and gravely damages the lungs.
One crack in a pipe can be a difference between pizza by the pool and an evening in the ER. I pray that everyone who was injured today finds healing.
I had so many different things that happened today that I had considered writing about. But sometimes we blink and life takes a left turn. A car accident. A new job. A divorce. A heart attack. Winning the lottery.
My life didn't take a left turn today but it could have. I am grateful. Grateful for my children tucked in bed. Grateful for my health, for my breath and my tired aching body. Grateful for pizza and a backyard with swings. Grateful for brothers who have each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment