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This is what happened to us a few days ago...

We were straightening up for Thanksgiving and my husband was in our living room, which is a room we barely use. We sometimes put mail in there. Anyway, he was sorting the mail and carrying some of it to the trashcan in our kitchen. Sometime later, we noticed white powder on a piece of furniture that was between the two rooms. We looked at each other and chuckled. We are not famous, nor are we democrats, so there is virtually no chance someone would deliberately send us Anthrax. I smelled the powder and it smelled like baby powder.

We didn't panic because getting Anthrax specifically sent to you is highly unlikely for anyone, especially someone who is not a high profile person. Second, if we were to somehow get Anthrax, we would not have seen any powder, because it would have come from the residue of another piece of mail. Third, Anthrax powder is brownish, and this was pure white. Fourth, it is probably unlikely that Anthrax smells like baby powder. :) It was hours later when I recalled seeing a small container of baby powder in a nearby drawer.

The case of this lady in Connecticut has suddenly reminded me of something strange that happened two years ago. If I may, let me run this by you all and see what you think. Living next door to us was a couple in their eighties. The husband had some physical problems, but the wife, for her age, was in pretty good shape. I had a fairly long conversation with her one Friday evening, when she seemed to be in perfectly fine health. Over that weekend, she suddenly became ill. By Monday, she was in the hospital, and by the end of the week she had died.

The really bizarre thing about her illness (apart from its incredible swiftness) was that the doctors NEVER determined what it was. At first, they thought she had lung cancer (she was a smoker.) When that didn't pan out, they thought it was pneumonia. Nope. Then, they decided she had tuberculosis, even though they admitted they had no idea how she could have caught it. Well, when the TB tests came out negative, they basically threw up their hands and gave up. Her sudden death remained a mystery.

Yesterday, when hearing about this Connecticut lady, I suddenly thought of my poor neighbor, and it hit me: Damn if all her symptoms didn't fit those of inhalation anthrax.

I'm a bit unnerved by the thought, and I'm not sure what--if anything--to make of it.