i am having an 'i got run over by a train' day. i was sick at my stomach - again - all night long and now i have to go to work. all i've had this morning is a cup of coffee.
a lot of things in my life are falling apart, while at the same time, a lot of other things seem to be coming together in a way. i am going to be leaving this apartment, and yet, now i understand why i have had sick winters for the past several years, including the years when i lived in the apartment above this one.
i heard about mold, years ago, but for some reason, i always believed my problems were caused by something else. i didn't know that mold would actually put out huge amounts of fumes that would fill an entire apartment. it doesn't usually put out that much, except when the wind blows over it. and it turns out that this house is drafty, and wind blows through the cracks in the building, through the areas in the walls, the ceilings, and the holes where the water pipes go into the walls, and the mold is in all of those places.
i have some photos of the mold, but i haven't done anything with my photos for a long time, because it's a hassle. i have to burn them onto a CD and then get them off that cd onto my desktop computer. this is because i have windows 98, and the camera won't upload to that. it won't install the software there. so i have to use my laptop, which is deliberately kept away from the internet, forever, so that it won't get viruses and hackers. (it has windows xp. that is enough of a virus in and of itself. that laptop is the slowest, most crap-filled computer that i have ever owned.)
now the laptop's hard drive is full, and i have to figure out why. i think it might be full because i have turned on the thing where you can recover the way the whole hard drive used to be set up, if there's a problem, so it has this historical record of all the old programs and settings and all that. so anyway, i was trying to upload a test video that i made with my camera, just a little thirty-second thing, and it wouldn't upload because the hard drive was full.
i found out that you can make pictures from videos, but you have to do it on the camera itself, because i haven't found anyplace in the software where you can do it. so i wanted to use that to get pictures of myself. instead of setting the camera to automatically take a photo, while you rush to get into the right place in front of the camera, you can just put it on video (it has to be the large size, not the small size video, or it won't let you make pictures), and then choose the frames that you like. however, it doesn't catch motion very well. motion is blurry in each frame. still, it works pretty well.
but all of this has been almost impossible to do because of being sick while i'm in this apartment. now that i know what's making me sick, i feel optimistic because i can finally get away from it. it's something beyond my control - it's up in the ceiling, where the leaking water rotted out under the sink upstairs. (that's what i took pictures of, which got me started on that subject.) every time we have windy days, like the last couple days, this apartment fills with fumes. all the times when this has happened, i was sure it was my fault, like i had mixed cleaning chemicals or something.
the incident at mcdonald's i'm sure now was mold too. there was a sink in the back where we did dishes. attached to it was another sink which was always covered up, but the water always dripped into there, and it was clogged or something, because it didn't drain out. so it got filled with mold and slime, and they periodically opened the lid over the sink and cleaned it.
for a few weeks in december 2007, we were ALL getting sick during the overnight shift, and opening the windows. it wasn't just me. we had the same symptoms: tripping and falling, collapsing, weakness, feeling like we couldn't breathe, not being able to think, a sensation in your head where your brain feels numb and stupid and you can't do anything.
on the day when we all got so sick that it was intolerable, the fumes were strongest back by that sink. but we theorized, eventually, that somebody had mixed bleach and ammonia together, and that was what caused it. i could not imagine that mold would put out so much fumes. it really filled the whole building from one small moldy sink. the fumes were so strong and so toxic that even small amounts were making EVERYONE sick, not just 'chemical sensitive nicole.'
however, whenever the store manager reassured me that it was all cleaned up, he, and everyone else, was still talking about it as though it was bleach/ammonia, not mold. they cleaned out that moldy sink, he told me. nobody really insisted that it had been mold, and i might have found it hard to believe if they had. i still don't know why it's hard for me to believe that mold can make THAT MUCH fumes. however, now that i remember how it felt, it felt exactly like the sensation i have when the mold is in my apartment.
i had to leave mcdonald's, because the mold was still in the air even after they had cleaned the sink out. it lingers a long time. and i tried to communicate with them, but they wouldn't call me back. but i wasn't the only person who got very sick.
after all these years, i finally believed it this year. there was always a moldy smell from under the sink, but it didn't usually make me sick. it just smelled horrible.
i found out that if i didn't use the sink, it wouldn't drip, and the moldy smell got better. i tested it this winter during the disaster of not being able to sleep in this apartment. i didn't use the sink for several weeks. the mold smell went away. then i used the dishwasher. suddenly the smell came back.
then the day after i used that dishwasher, i opened the cabinet under the sink, and the moldy smell hit me, and suddenly i was so sick i almost collapsed and almost threw up. then i had the stumbling/uncoordination, where i can't control how my feet are walking, and i can't tell where my limbs are in 3D space, so i bump into things. so i started tripping and falling, and the same thing had happened at mcdonald's. loss of coordination, and weakness. that was when i finally believed that mold could do that.
it was helped because i also read about mold on someone else's blog, one of the other gangstalking targets (http://ongangstalking.blogspot.com/), and she said something about how mold gets worse if it's freezing and thawing. i had noticed that the mold was worst on the days when it was bitter cold, and it seemed to happen every winter, for the last few years. that helped me to start observing the mold and noticing what it did in response to weather and temperature. it got worst when it was bitter freezing cold, or humid, or breezy and drafty and the wind was blowing through the walls of the house.
it was opening that cabinet door that completely convinced me.
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