Tuesday 14 August 2007

Losing power

Last night we had a live test of losing power while Raphael is connected up to his CPAP machine.

For some reason one of our electrical appliances acted up and tripped the safety switch that powers our house. The Oxygen monitor alarmed for just long enough to wake me up before its aged battery died. Floundering up from my deep sleep and trying to find my torch in the pitch black, I could hear Raphael starting to snore without the CPAP operating and so I knew that he was ok.

After calling our electrical provider and resetting our safety switch, I got back to sleep at 3:15am only to be awoken again at 3:45 by one, rather sad sounding, oxygen alarm beep as the power was cut off again. I reset the switch again and this time I was only awarded 15 minutes before the power failed again and now I couldn't reset the power switch without it immediately tripping. The next hour was spent by me hunting around the house turning off all of the power points I could think of, in my sleepy state, and resetting the safety switch. I had to try this several times until I had though of the device which was actually causing the problem.

I checked on Raphael every few minutes during this time but he happily slept through the whole thing, apparently oblivious to the lack of sleep that my concern for him was causing.

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