cancer – day 625
OMG, I can’t even begin to tell you how lucky I am. Night before last, there seemed to be a slightly stinky smell on the side of the house where the septic tank is. Yesterday I cleaned everything I could, and even completely drained and rinsed and dried out the entire aquarium. The top section of the aquarium, where the infininty-edge waterfall happens, seemed to smell especially bad even though I’ve always had water filters throughout the system and I put in fresh water every week, sometimes twice a week. I could not for the life of me figure out why it smelled so bad, but there it was on the counter next to my sink, dry as a bone, and yet somehow stinky.
The smell didn’t seem that bad in my bedrooms or office, so I kept all the doors in the house closed, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. Then last night when I left my office to escape work a little and make something to eat, I could smell it even more. I reassembled the aquarium (still empty and completely dry) and covered it. I scrubbed the sinks and emptied every trash and recycling container, removed everything from under the sink where it seemed more smelly, and washed out the entire under-sink area in the kitchen, then went to bed hoping the smell would go away. I even ran my oven self-cleaner, which is a three-hour process where my gas oven burns itself up to clean out any drippings that may cause smoke or smell.
It didn’t seem that bad when I woke up, but I always sleep with the fan on for white noise, and it had been too warm in the house so last night I had the window open a couple inches. I also, as usual, closed the door to just about cat-size to keep the plug-in glows in the hallway and kitchen from keeping me up in the middle of the night if the cats woke me. (When Mizzou can’t sleep at night, NO ONE sleeps at night, he is sooooo high maintenance that way.) Anyway, I slept ok. Not great, but not bad. Any night when I can sleep more than a few hours without waking up is generally as good as it gets for me, even though I’m tired all the time. I still tend to blame it on the neuropathy and always feeling the burning, having that wearing down my nerves all the time even when I’m too busy with work to let myself think about it. Anyway . . .
This morning I was up (as usual) at 4:45AM, and online checking e-mail by 5AM. Luckily the big snowstorm that had been so thick my satellite couldn’t get signal through it had cleared and it wasn’t snowing anymore, so my satellite was working again. Man, yesterday was a pain, with my satellite being so flaky I couldn’t get e-mail online and the electricity going off then on then off again. So I was relieved when everything seemed to be working correctly this morning, and I was burrowing away at answering questions and following up on voicemails and chasing down loose ends on a whole bunch of projects. There is more going on at work than I can even hope to keep up with, and I’m honestly really trying to cut down my hours to something more normal than 60+/week.
By 8AM this morning, when I could finally call the septic place to come check it out, I was getting a headache from the smell, even in my office, where my door was open just enough for the cats to come and go. And in the kitchen it was so awful the smell around the sinks/cooking area was so smelly it made me nauseous. Then the septic place tells me they can’t send anyone for a week because the snowstorm got them behind. I must have sounded really pathetic asking them if someone could just stop by and take a quick look, because I wasn’t even completely sure it was the septic backing up, and I wasn’t really sure if I should be calling the septic place or a plumber. (My garbage disposal had stopped working, also, though I SWEAR that was not the source of the smell). Anyway, I somehow convinced the owner of the septic place to drive out to Volcanoville to inspect my septic tank and tell me what he thought the problem was.
We went through the house, and he fixed the garbage disposal and taught me how to reboot it if it died again. It was definitely not the garbage disposal. He checked the tanks outside and said they look great, I’m years away from needing them drained and there’s definitely no seepage or anything like that. It also turns out I have a pipe for draining the RV septic tanks into the underground septic, which was a good thing to learn, it’ll save a little money here and there, not having to pay a campground to let me drain the tanks after a trip.
The septic guy tried to open the drain in the guest bathroom shower, which hasn’t been used, since oh I don’t know, either when my parents were here last summer, or maybe some day last fall when the cats went out and got dirty and needed a bath. At any rate, it had been many months since the guest bath was used, and the septic guy taught me all about how septic systems and drainage works, and he said the smell was from the pipe water trap thing in the guest bath getting completely dried out, which allows air to pass back into the house from the septic tanks. Unbelievable. He said to run water through every sink and drain including my washing machine every single time I get back from a trip, to make sure there is a little water in the piping system so no air passes through the pipes. Who’d-a-thunk it, here I thought people were supposed to worry about pipes freezing up from having water in them, and here he is explaining to me how I should never let my drainage system go dry. Live and learn.
It was a costly lesson, but it was worth the $150 inspection fee. The poor guy couldn’t even get all the way here because of the snow, I had to go get him from down the road with my Jeep. Thankfully he was running a job in Georgetown and was willing to drive up here from that on his lunch break. I had no idea how to fix the problem or even what the problem was, so I wasn’t going to haggle with him on his standard inspection fee, I was so relieved to know what was going on and how to handle it in the future, and I was glad there wasn’t any kind of damage or repairs that needed to be done. He told me to air out the house as much as I could today, and it should be better since we had gotten water back in those drain pipes that are never used in the guest bath. I opened everything up and turned on all the ceiling fans. It was a little over 50 degrees today, so I was able to have the windows open a couple hours before it got too cold to tolerate and I shut the house back up and turned on the heater again.
Meanwhile, my headache is getting worse, and we’re now in migraine territory, even the clouded, tree-filled view from my office window was too bright, and I could hardly breathe in my kitchen. I decided the septic guy must have been wrong, and I started smelling everything as closely as possible in the kitchen, every pipe, along the floor, everywhere there was air movement. For some reason I thought the stove seems more stinky than the rest of the kitchen. So I smelled all around it, down on the floor where there was the slightest bit of draft from the connectors running under the kitchen, around the sides of the oven where it’s conceivable a small bit of uncooked chicken could have possibly slipped without my knowing it. I try to be so careful about that little gap, but it’s always possible something could get down there.
I also leaned my head down and smelled, very carefully and deeply, each gas burner on the stove, and, lo and behold, one of the burners is leaking a tiny, tiny bit of gas. When I leaned my head down and put my ear right up to it, I could hear the slight hiss. I hadn’t caught the whispery sound before because of all the fans and other white noise in the house. I shut off the gas to the stove, and I think the smell is going away. It’s cold out now, but I have every window in the living room, dining room, and kitchen open and the fans on, and I’m in the office with my door closed with the fan on. I’m going to tolerate the cold as long as I can and then close things back up before I go to bed.
Obviously the reason I am soooooo lucky is that I didn’t burn down my house, having this little gas leaking for at least two whole days that I know of. And here I was cooking in there last night, and burning candles all over the house today trying to mask this smell. And here it’s a gas leak. How unbelievably lucky is it that I didn’t get myself blown up last night or today???
My mom is going to have a fit.