Powerless

When the power goes out

I often feel powerless, especially as a disabled senior woman, even in the 21^st century, and I hate feeling that way.

This feeling of helplessness—of having no self-determination over one’s life—is magnified when a ferocious storm rushes through and knocks out our power. The simplest, everyday tasks become challenging, even though we’ve taken steps to be prepared.

We have bottles of drinking water stored in the basement, and use some of it to flush toilets since we no longer have the aboveground pool as a non-drinking water source. Getting water to the horses, especially in this heat, adds a whole new level of terror for me. If ComEd doesn’t restore the power soon (notifications say possibly not until Friday), we will need to find a neighbor who has power to their well and a way to transport a hundred gallons of water to help us refill our stock tank in the barn.

We live a mile away from our nearest neighbor on our little twenty-acre farm, and we get our water from a 350-foot well that we had drilled the third year we lived here, which was the soonest we could manage financially. We’d been drinking and showering with water made safe through chlorination (literally bleach added to our waterline in the basement) since we’d moved in. As a vegetarian-sometimes-vegan, now for thirty years, with a philosophy of seeing food as medicine, drinking contaminated well water, made legally usable with chlorine, felt like I was slowly committing suicide.

Dying from drinking our old well water is perhaps an exaggeration, but it speaks to how important water is to my health and wellbeing. Now, even though our well water is pure and delicious, I still only drink it after a charcoal and reverse-osmosis (RO) system filters out any small particles of contamination.

If our horses didn’t need water, I could manage being without power for perhaps as long as four days, because Greg hooks extension cords to a small gas-powered generator. It powers our internet network terminal in the basement, the refrigerator, and the freezer so Greg’s meat doesn’t spoil and all our hand-picked-then-frozen strawberries from our garden won’t defrost and turn to mush.

Last night, he spent nearly an hour running multiple cords in white, yellow, blue, and green, adding up to several hundred feet. The generator has enough plugs to hook to cords run throughout the house, including one to a strip so I can charge our phones, our computers, turn on a light, run a single fan, and plug in my recliner. It’s not fun getting out of my recliner to transfer into my wheelchair when my legs are elevated and there’s no power to lower them, but with Greg’s help, I manage.

One more power cord splits between the tv and the coffeepot. He tries to run a line to the microwave, but there’s just not enough power left for it to reheat even a cup of coffee. At night, he transfers the coffeepot cord upstairs to run my c-Pap and an osculating floor-stand fan to help cool us and our German shepherd dog, Killian. That’s how we manage when we’re without power for a few days.

Over the last thirty years, the power has been out so many times that I feel like a veteran of power outages. I even wrote a 15-page essay in 2010 about when we were without power for three days over Christmas with waist-high snow making our lane impassible and thus making it impossible for Greg to fetch more gasoline for the generator.

Now that I’m in a wheelchair, being without power is exponentially more challenging.

I drive a powered zero-turn chair, so I can get around, but I worry about getting my wheels tangled up in the extension cords running throughout the house. And I hate that I can’t help much. When I’m not  able to help Greg, I feel the most powerless.

I work hard to find ways to assist him, like getting myself upstairs to bed at night and back down in the morning on my own. I can stand long enough with a cane and one handrail to pull myself up the 16 steps, and ease myself back down. From my wheelchair twice a day, I feed the dog and give him fresh water, and I do the same for JD, our 17 YO cat who lives in my lap whenever I am in my recliner. I’ve even figured out how to get out to our garden to plant and pull weeds, as long as the rain hasn’t soaked the ground, creating mushy grass and mud that my wheels get stuck in.

When our power went out last month, it was the loop-shaped breaker adjacent to the transformer high on the pole next to our house that was at fault. When a surge shorted it out, it didn’t drop open. The repairman couldn’t define the problem until he went up in the man-lift. The power equipment is old, you see, and worn out—just like me. He said it was rare to shut off power like that, but if it did again, they would need to switch out the breaker.

Today, with those details that Greg had relayed to me, along with us being on a well, having horses, and me being disabled ready to plead my case, I reclaimed a bit of my authority when I called the power company and asked them to expedite the troubleshooting for our outage. I was thrilled when she immediately wrote up a ticket and tagged it to the attention of her supervisor.

Sometimes, we can achieve empowerment simply by making a polite, concise phone call. My fingers are crossed we’ll have power restored soon.