Last night was a nightmare. Everything seemed normal; I went to bed while my husband was working on the computer. Out of nowhere, he woke me up in the early hours of the morning, telling me that the living room was flooding. I got up, and the two of us started mopping up the water. The strange thing is that the water was coming from outside the apartment; my husband went upstairs and it turned out it was coming from the floor above. The water got in here yesterday, and apparently the neighbors upstairs weren’t home but left a faucet running. The thing is, that apartment flooded so badly that the water spilled into the hallway and down the stairs to the floor below (us), and we were the hardest hit because the neighbors on our floor have a kind of wall at their entrance that keeps the water from coming in… In my desperation, I posted in the building’s group chat, and that led some neighbors to come help us. But it took over an hour to scoop out the water and pass it up to the next floor because we literally had no choice, and the water just kept pouring down from above.
I didn't have time to take many photos, but I took the one above from a video my husband recorded while he was pumping out the water. It was really frustrating, but despite everything, I was glad to see that our neighbors helped us—I never would have imagined they would. All of this happened at 2 a.m.—can you believe it? At that hour, almost everyone is asleep.
But that wasn't even the worst part; the worst part was that I went up to the 15th floor with my husband to help him finish draining the water, and I slipped the first time. This floor is extremely slippery. I fell and hit the ground hard, but it wasn't anything to make a big deal out of. My neighbor told me to be careful, and I got up. But as soon as I took my first step, the worst part happened: I fell down the stairs from the 15th floor to the 14th, rolled down the entire staircase, bounced around, and hurt my head, neck, arms, legs, buttocks, and tailbone. There was no way to stop the fall; in fact, each step made me go faster. I practically flew down, and at the bottom of the stairs, I hit a wall right on the head. I still think about it and can’t believe it—I’d never fallen down stairs like that before, and I was incredibly lucky because I could have died. My husband tried to help me up right away, but I told him I couldn’t move. I lay there on the floor for a while; the neighbors were really scared. Eventually, I made my way inside as best I could because it was hard to walk, and I sat down, but sitting hurts so much—it still hurts a lot. I’ve spent the day lying down because that’s the only way it hurts less.
And I can’t even blame the neighbors upstairs for their carelessness anymore, because at the end of the day, that could happen to anyone… I think the real culprits are those incompetent people running this country, where we don’t have access to water every day like normal people, where there are weeks when they only turn the water on for a single day while we have to do laundry, clean, fill the tanks, and so on. The water situation is getting worse and worse, and to top it all off, things like this happen—and on top of that, some neighbors from the floors below got upset because we poured the water down the stairs, as if it wasn’t going to run down anyway… I don’t know where they expected me to pour the water, or maybe they wanted my house to flood completely so everyone would be happy and content. It’s been a pretty awful day; I’ve felt really bad. Obviously, I couldn’t go to the doctor, but I’m managing the pain a little with ibuprofen.