WOW it must’ve been bad…

I get home last night from my weekend.

It’s hotter than hell in the apartment.

I flip on the A/C brush my teeth and go to bed, images of getting to work dancing in my head.

About two hours later I wake up because I’m having trouble breathing.  I get up and then my nose informs me that there is a powerful and bad chemical smell in the air. It smells like paint, disinfectant, and bugspray.

The fun from the circus downstairs keeps on coming. 

They’re gone, but in their wake, they apparently left a filthy mess. The landlord had painters in very fast. Apparently, my apartment is not isolated from the unit downstairs. Great! So it’s roast or…

Bill TrueBlood

There’s stickiness on my face. I flip on the bathroom light and there in the mirror is my visage looking quite a bit like Dawn of the Dead, or like a vampire that’s just fed from TrueBlood. 

I wash my face. Both pillowcases and pillows are covered with blood, the sheets are a mess too. My sinuses are still seeping blood and well, it looked rather gothic. I turn off the A/C and open the windows. Both pillowcases, the sheets, and the underlying pillow covers are spritzed with laundry detergent and left to soak. 

Fresh albeit warm air wafts in through the open slider and bedroom window. I start to feel better, then the vomiting started.

I pull on some clothes and head out to the patio, waiting for my stomach and the rest of my body to return to normal. After a couple of hours I’m feeling better. I go to sleep in my sleeping bag.

Red blood splatter queen duvet

Needless to say I did not go to work today. In a choice between my health and anyone else’s needs I win, anything else looses.

This morning, after a fitful night’s sleep, I go to breakfast, the market, then come back to the apartment. I carry the bloody dripping mess over to the laundry facility and pray to God that nobody sees me, because it looks like I’m trying to cover up a murder scene.

The bed is remade and it doesn’t look like anything is the worse for wear except me. My sinuses are still a mess, and after talking with the maintenance guy working in the apartment below, We’ve come up with a compromise. He’s going to leave the windows and doors of the place below open, and I’m going to run my A/C with my doors and windows open in an effort to flush the chemicals out of the system.

I’m putting in a service request to see about making sure that my apartment air intake is as independent as it can be but that won’t happen until Monday at the earliest.

On the plus side of things… 

I now know that the pillowcovers are washable and that they’ll absorb quite a lot of blood.

I also was able to get the blood out of the pillowcases and sheets, I guess I got it soaking before it set. Had I known that this was likely, I’d have stayed in a hotel for the night. But as it’s said, hindsight is 20/20.

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