The Great Chemical Purge of '09 - Toxic Fumes and Environmental Illness

This is hard to explain, because I'm sitting in my apartment, and I can't think clearly. I'm spending as little time in here as possible right now.

I've had severe fatigue for a while now, but I've had bouts of fatigue on and off for years, usually triggered by chemicals. I don't always know right away what's causing it. It takes troubleshooting and trial and error.

In the past couple days, the fatigue turned into the scary kind of sleepiness, where it's not like the usual chronic fatigue, but instead, it's more the 'Carbon Monoxide Is Putting Me To Sleep' kind of fatigue. I can't find my carbon monoxide detector - I think I might have left it at McDonald's or something, back in the great 'Poisonous Fumes At McDonald's' incident in December 2007. (I think I wrote about that one on MySpace. 'Go ahead and fire me!') But I don't think it's carbon monoxide.

(In addition to the fatigue and sleepiness, I also had almost two weeks of recurring Norovirus, which developed into appendicitis. The appendicitis is going away on its own. Viral appendicitis can happen when you get an ordinary stomach virus, but it's usually mild and it heals itself. I have had *mild* viral appendicitis many times before and I recognize the feeling. But with two weeks of Norovirus, it was getting bad enough that I was ready to talk to the doctor - and that's saying something. Just when I was about to look up a doctor in the phone book, the Norovirus went away and the appendicitis died down.)

So far I've had a couple theories. There is definitely bad air. I feel it when I breathe, especially in certain locations. It's very similar to what happened at McDonald's. And this is the third time that I have had a toxic fumes incident in my apartment. The previous two times, it seemed to have been triggered by cleaning chemicals.

Well, I just recently sprayed some Windex in the bathroom, and last time I had a toxic fumes incident, I had recently done something similar, except that it had bleach in it last time. This time, there was no bleach. I am not sure if the bad air is caused by the chemicals or if it has some other unknown cause. But it began shortly after I used that spray.

While trying to find the problem, I found a pool of mystery liquid which was in the middle of a pile of mystery powder. You don't know how messy my house is. This mess is the result of several years of unimaginable disaster and a lack of social support. (The lack of social support is finally being fixed right now, a little at a time.)

I had a whole bunch of bottles of cleaning chemicals sitting around in the kitchen on the floor, which I had been using to attempt to clean the herbal oils out of the laundry. (It didn't work, and the chemicals made everything much worse than it had been originally.) I just recently moved a bunch of junk around, and there was one bottle that I sort of kicked from one pile of junk into another pile of junk.

I had about a dozen different boxes and bottles of various things all around. There was Borax (I got rid of that long ago because it made me so sick), bleach, ammonia, PineSol, some kind of wood-cleaning oil, Windex, carpet shampoos, Mr. Clean, and other things. The one that spilled was the PineSol. Oh yeah, I also had de-limer and rust remover, and I remember that the de-limer we used at McDonald's was horrible to breathe, so I didn't trust the one that I had.

After cleaning up the spill as well as I could, I then collected every single bottle of every single chemical that I had, and I threw all of them away, out in the dumpster. (Definition of 'chemical': something liquid or powder, usually in a bottle or can, intended for cleaning, and able to react easily with other chemicals. It's a vague definition. I realize that, technically, all physical objects in the universe are made out of chemicals.) I don't use those things except on very rare occasions. I bought them all out of desperation when I was trying to fix the laundry problem.

Some of the bottles had been there for years. They are now no longer a hazard in my house.

I slept with the windows open last night. I bought a sleeping bag so I could keep warm.

Even though I wiped up the spill, there is still something wrong with the air. I am going to try a couple things. First, I've had the windows open. I will try again cleaning up the area where the spill was, and cleaning it more thoroughly. I am also observing the hot water heater because there seems to be bad air lingering in that area, although that could be just because it's back in an enclosed corner where the air doesn't circulate much. The water heater is electric, *NOT GAS*, thank goodness, so it isn't having a gas problem. I am afraid of gas appliances. They really can put out carbon monoxide. There are no appliances in my apartment or in this house anywhere that could produce carbon monoxide. It's most likely a chemical problem from the cleaning fluids.

So, I didn't sleep very well last night. I actually got a second sleeping bag just this afternoon. The first sleeping back was a lightweight one, and I used it while sleeping indoors. The one I bought today is a heavy-duty one and I am going to see what happens if I try to take a nap in my car.

This is deja-vu. It was the dead of winter the last two times that I had toxic fumes incidents. In 2007, the ephedra/tobacco/herbs cleanup triggered an incident, and I attempted to sleep in my car a couple times, and it was in the early spring or late winter, maybe around March, or April. In 2008, the incident was mild enough that I was able to handle it by just opening the bathroom window and putting a fan on - but it was also in the winter, around February.

This incident is mild enough, and I'm pretty sure it's the little pool of mystery chemicals that was on the floor in the kitchen. So I don't expect it to be that big of a deal to clean up and air out, and I expect it to be fixed in a day or two. In a way I'm glad it happened, because it caused me to throw away all of the bottles of cleaning chemicals that I wasn't using, and I'm happy to be rid of them. I will not buy cleaning chemicals again - I don't want any chemicals in my house except for just a couple of small, simple things that are less threatening. (Like dish detergent.)

The other positive thing is that I have spent the past few months meeting more people and making some (tentative) new friends, local people, so if it's an emergency, there are real people who I can go to if I have a situation so severe that I have to get out of the apartment immediately. This hasn't quite reached that phase yet, but if it did, I'd have somewhere to go.

The other aspect of this is that I recently changed my work schedule so that I'm on three days a week. I wasn't quite ready to do that, but I had to, because, as I said, I've had the problem with fatigue and it was getting worse, and I was having trouble going to work and having trouble concentrating and getting my job done. (There was an incident where I was supposed to make a whole bunch of salads because the salads were going on sale the next day, and I didn't get it done, and everybody was angry. And it was mostly because I was too tired to think clearly, and I didn't communicate with them about how many salads I could realistically produce in a certain period of time, while also shutting everything down and cleaning up. It would not have been possible for any person to do it, but I said yes, I could do it, and they all expected that I would do as I said.)

This is my very first week with the three days schedule, and cleaning up the house is exactly the type of thing I intended to do during that 'free' time. (I don't really feel like I have any actual free leisure time to do fun things - my life is still too full of problems and anxieties.)

This is the year of asking for help and getting more social support and meeting people. That's the only thing that can help me right now, getting more people involved in my life. The problems and disasters were piling up faster and faster, and they buried me. I could not clean up one disaster before the next disaster hit. And the time is passing. So I am doing something different now, and I am getting people to help.

So that's my day today. There's a lot more space in the kitchen with all of that clutter gone.