meeting 4 bernie

                     Sangre de Cristo Mts

I had misgivings about going back to New Mexico this past weekend, because I was a bit shy of having my preferred respiratory drugs, but, on the other hand, wasn't going empty-handed either. A nebulizer setup, while bulky and sometimes awkward 2 use, helps administer the 2 drugs my lungs most need -- albuterol and ipratropium bromide -- so figured I'd B OK, and I mostly was.

New Mexico is largely higher than I should go. And I remembered headaches & nausea from my last visit to Santa Fe, which, at 7000 feet, inflicts altitude sickness on large numbers of unwary travelers quite frequently.

We left Mesa on Friday & stayed in Holbrook AZ that nite, then pushed on past Albuquerque & Santa Fe the next day,  determined in 2 see the "Lourdes of the New World," the mission church of Chimayo, where you can feel peace emanating from the very adobes. At times too, there are fervid defenses of the Virginity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is actually a portemanteau god -- a combination of the Virgin Mary & Tonantzin, the Aztec Moon goddess -- all in a rarified atomosphere of  8,037 feet above sea level.

We were not done yet, however, and pushed on up highway NM 76 past the towns of Cordova and Truchas, to the village of Trampas, deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I was unable to come up with an accurate elevation figure for this tiny place, with its magnificent parish church of San Jose de a Gracia, but it's sufficient 2  say it's very high. 

That night we returned 2 Santa Fe & found lodgings; I was quite pleased with myself, as I showed no signs of altitude sickness or respiratory meltdown, despite having gone way past he 7000-ft altitude that sickened me in 2014.  

Pride goeth before the fall. The next morning we looked forward to attending the meeting which was the purpose of the trip, an organizational session for the local Bernie Sanders campaign, from which Kit & I hoped to learn how to do something similar in Mesa, with the difference being that Mesa is largely Mormon and Republican and Santa Fe, to put it mildly, isn't.

I don't remember when I realized that I was missing the nebulizer bulb that holds the medicine which is rendered breathable by an air compressor, but as we left town I knew my plans to post a blog account of our trip on Sunday evening, as I usually do, wasn't going to happen.

I ended up in a hospital ER in Grants, New Mexico, halfway between Albuquerque and Gallup, where after a very long wait, I was given an albuterol puffer and sent on my way.

As I left the ER I found my nebulizer, stuck in a small storage pocket on the passenger door of the car. So it goes.

We made it home a few hrs ago, bedraggled & fashed & fagged but otherwise OK. I want to go back to New Mexico again, but only if I've got the full arsenal of my preferred respiratory drugs, which make life doable for short periods at any elevation.

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