My Canary in This Coal Mine
6 Comments | by Lucy Wightman Canary in the Coal Mine
By Jove! I think spring sprung. Budded buds are budding. Leaves that left are returning and not leaving. Green is a verb again. Seeded seeds seem to be seeding and water is more watery. Worms are worming at breakneck speeds. Weeds require weeding.
This possibly makes no sense. Reading it back I hear it as an adult version of Dick and Jane, but worse. The fact that I can hear what it sounds like in my head is progress!
Three years ago I moved into this little rental house, hoping for relief from my finding Starburst wrappers and strands of Torri hair. While some relief was found, other holes in me were opening silently. These holes gradually took over and their symptoms were misattributed.
Loss, PTSD, grief, depression, cysts, bones, teeth, and sinuses and eventual death were all logical conclusions. By November I was consistently unwell, but without a fever, or a specific pain that would warrant non-functioning. I felt sick all over, and stayed home more and more. I exhausted myself trying to follow through on any task and to say I lost interest in things is an understatement.
Sure, I had headaches but Advil worked for those. When coughing woke me, I took a slug from the super size Benadryl bottle next to my bed. Once alive and a awake in the morning, I knew I had just enough time to make coffee and sit down before my head would feel tingly and separate from the rest of me.
Insomnia invaded all of my life. My fingers cracked with fissures deep enough to warrant super glue. My Little Man started having what I thought were seizures (actually they are cardiovascular resulting from damage to his heart muscle), the majority of them at night, so naturally I moved my mattress onto the floor for him.
I had no awareness that my ability to form sentences was dissolving. I avoided reading but did not realize it. The New Yorker was all I could manage and even then nothing could get me to the end of a paragraph. A friend who I consider very smart and honest told me that he couldn’t understand what I was writing. I stopped writing for the paper.
Why was an article about a selectman’s meeting at town hall so daunting? The concept of an inverted pyramid evaded me. Why was I trying to reinvent the grammatical order of sentences and paragraphs? I realized how the letter ‘d’ often leaves itself off words. Frustrated and ashamed, I fell back to the visual and muddled through in spite of vision problems.
Prior to noticing these detailed losses, I had more diffuse problems like long and short-term memory gaps that gradually became severe enough to make lists ineffective. Forgetting the list’s meaning, importance or timeline rendered a well-intention day useless.
The natural process of thinking caused thoughts to wrap around themselves like a wound up garden hose hung too many times without a serious straightening. Processing speed became slower over time and I stopped being able to add, subtract, multiply or divide in my head.
One night in January I was so dizzy and weak that I took an ambulance ride to the ER. The nurse looked over me and asked, “You are here for a sinus infection?”
One doctor mentioned that something else must have been going on. For whatever reason this triggered my memory for an incident last summer when the fire department was here. Our street smelled awful and many of us congregated outside, noses sniffing in different directions like hounds readying for a hunt. Our conclusion was that it must have been the low tide and rotting seaweed. I closed my windows because the smell was so bad.
Many times before this I would arrive home and think that Winkle had had a restroom emergency in the house. After looking, every time, I found nothing.
That particularly malodorous day, when I reentered the house, the smell weakened my knees. I retrieved Winkle and called 911. It was coming from my basement where the homeowners had attempted to install their own bathroom in November of 2007. Not being plumbers, things were installed improperly (to include an ejector pump and gas lines) and not vented, allowing sewer gases to find their escape into the house.
I told them right away and they promised to fix it immediately. I then made the wrong assumption that something so dangerous, so hazardous, was fixed. Their recent response via email was “No, we didn’t fix it, why? Is it fixed? That would be wonderful!”
At least someone was cheerful. I, on the other hand, have been breathing in mostly odorless sewer gases, but that isn’t all.
Through multiple home inspections, it was discovered that the gas dryer was vented indoors, spewing carbon monoxide from underneath the kitchen and living room. The two gas fireplaces (which I use to heat the house) were installed by the same non-plumber and can be presumed faulty. And the worst thing – the homeowner thought the smoke detectors were “combination” type detectors that react to smoke and CO. Nope.
There were no carbon monoxide detectors in the house.
The day carbon monoxide showed itself in my blood levels, I was stunned. It was not what I expected. I have the carbon monoxide in my blood measured to see that it is decreasing with time.
I have learned a little bit about long-term exposure to carbon monoxide and its effects are unfortunately long-term. This is not to say I won’t improve over time. Having had some of the issues fixed, and being able to open the windows these last few weeks, I have a little more energy and my insomnia is better.
How I wish I could have recognized the poisoning sooner, mostly for Winkle of course, the innocent ‘canary in the coal mine,’ who has only me to depend on. My focus is on forward momentum, but I have let go of the lost time and cannot bear to look backwards much. There are too many things in back of me and my balance is not that great.
Streamlining the meandering lines of my life seems to make sense. This would explain the website and how I am rearranging things in more of an order. Although I am still trying to understand what a “blog” is exactly.
Apr 20, 2010 at 8:39 AM diary, informational carbon monoxide, lucy wightman, poisoning | Share Article
Reader Comments (6)
Sue
Because, dear Lucy, you are looking for order and logic where none exists.
But, your ability to form glorious sentences is intact. The first paragraph here is magical. Really.
And I should know. After all, it's my job.