For years, I had wanted to build a deck on the back of our house. We had nothing outside our rear sliding door but a couple of wooden steps down onto the lawn. After planning it out all spring I started to get to work in June. My dad was coming to help me with it at the end of the month, so I wanted to have the footings in the ground so we could start framing right away.
I rented a “one man post hole digger” that was supposed to make the job easier, but using it still seemed to take a lot out of me. I was losing my breath faster than usual. I figured I was just getting more out of shape. Later, while we were framing the deck, which involved carrying a lot of heavy lumber around, I continued to feel out of breath a lot sooner than I was used to. I also started noticing that it hurt to inhale deeply.
I had mixed a lot of bags of concrete in order to pour the deck footings. I
began to worry that perhaps I had accidentally inhaled some of the cement dust and damaged my lungs.
After a weekend and three vacation days from work, we completed all of the deck except for the railing on Wednesday, June 29th. We had two days back at work and then looked forward to a three-day weekend with Independence Day right around the corner.
