The way that change rules our life, is truly an amazing phenomenon. It can fulfill our dreams or can rip them from our grasp in a single breath. Over the years I have learned to embrace whatever change life may throw at me. I had no choice really, it was either I accepted graciously, or dwell in the depths of despair and self-pity. The latter, is indeed a dark and lonely place to exist.

I've done irreparable damage to my body through not being willing to change the attitude in which I chose to go forward in my life. It was only after I accepted things would get worse for me physically, that I modified my behavior.

Pain and injury have been a staple in my fifty-two years of stumbling through this life. To the point of having to change employment and rearrange my recreational pursuits each time another part of my body failed. The learning of trying to keep it together, while you watch your manhood slowly seep from your grasp can be rather a depressing realization.

But I'm a fighter; I had to be, just to be able to have survived this long. Now my employment is down to doing some home security, lawn and pool maintenance. Yes that's right, I look after a few houses, mow lawns and clean swimming pools while the retired owners go traveling for half of the year. It's cushy, out in the sun and I can keep my own hours, and that suits me just fine.

Of course this is not where I saw my future taking me, but hey, like I said, bend or break, they're the choices.

Just over a year ago, June 2012, I had an unfortunate accident that facilitated one of those changes. My wife had been suffering debilitating depression and anxiety, and I was fitting my employment in around, when I had the chances to do so.

Late one afternoon, I had a window of opportunity to hurry down to one of the houses I looked after, and attend to the swimming pool. I had worked on this swimming pool for four years or more, so you'd think I would know the workings of it, right? ... No, wrong, in my haste to refill the twenty-litre chemical drums for the automatic feeding system, I poured the hydrochloric acid in the chlorine drum by mistake.

This was not a new procedure for me; I had done this over a hundred times before, without a hitch. But this day, my mind just wasn't on the job. A white plume poured up from the plastic twenty-litre drum and instantly sucked the breath from my lungs.

The trouble was, I was in a confined area and unable to get the container off the system without first undoing four bolts to remove it. I held my breath for as long as I could, but I couldn't even manage to get to one of the bolts, without the fumes going up my nose. I'd run outside to try and get my breath back, take in a few deep hits of fresh air and run back in to try again.

But now the whole filter room was engulfed by the white fumes, my eyes were stinging and watering. I couldn't get anywhere near the container, but I managed to undo one bolt before having to exit again. I thought I needed to do something pretty fast as there didn't seem to be a safe distance, as the fumes widened.

I came up with the bright idea to go back in the room, take a lid off one of the unused containers and screw it on, thus stopping the fumes. Sounds as if it would work, right?... No, wrong, again. The container started swelling up straight away. By putting a lid on the container, I had intensified the chemical reaction and turned it into a bomb.

By now, I had been in and out of the room about four times. With each entry back into the room, the container was growing. My logic was beginning to blur, the dizziness swirled, my eyes burned and It was hard to take a proper breath anymore without small gags in between. You'd think I would have just waited, but no. I had to undo the bolts, release the barrier around the containers and get this swelling time bomb out before it exploded.

One bolt per breath was all I could only manage. I went back in a total of eight times without any thought of what these fumes may be doing to me. Dizzy and disorientated, I managed to get the container out and dispose of the deadly concoction I had created.

There was a small bathroom next door to the filter room, I turned the shower on and stepped in fully clothed. I stood there, hands cupped, sucking up the water through my nostrils, trying to rinse away any chemical residue I had ingested.

I choked, I splattered, but continued to rinse every orifice the fumes could have entered: my eyes, nose, ears and mouth.

A fifteen minute job had become an hour long battle and I still had to go back in to the filter room to hook up a new container of chlorine. Why? Because that's me, a sense of 'over and above' the duty type of person, either that or just plain stupid. Yeah, in reflection, even I thought the latter!

I walked back towards home with one hell of a headache. My eyes, throat and nose were burning and I had a real sense of a shortness of breath with every raspy inhalation.

My next dilemma was, do I tell my wife what I had just done and risk her going into a full-blown anxiety attack? Or do I just underplay it and see how I fare?


'To be continued'...