This Ill Feeling Is No Longer Mysterious

As I may have mentioned earlier, my fiance and I have been renting a small house in small town Iowa where my fiance is working. When we first moved into this old little house, we had all sorts of problems. It wasn't too surprising, as the place had been vacant for over a year when we moved in. First, there was the plumbing, which took awhile to get fully functional. Then we had to get the water heater fixed, then before winter set in, the furnace needed help. And after that, miraculously, everything worked for several whole months!

Well, then I kept catching what seemed to be random colds. I was sick with three seemingly different things (complete with their own distinct symptoms) one after another and was totally blaming it on the weather. I mean, the Midwest is famous for immune system-wrenching spikes and drops in temperature this time of year, plus there's allergies to take into account. So I figured (especially as this spring is my first living in this area) that I was just allergic to something.

Then J, my fiance, started getting headaches and feeling crappy. He has an extremely sensitive sense of smell and was complaining that the house smelled funny a couple of days ago. I noticed it a little bit, too. This weekend we got back from a field trip to Sioux Falls (our nearest source of sushi and many other delicious GF things), having been gone all day, to discover our hot water wasn't working. It would flow, but it was cold.

Last time we had this problem, the pilot light on the water heater had gone out. So we go down to the basement to check it and--

We find that our basement is flooded with foul-smelling, tepid water. As in sewage. o.O It was six inches deep, and high enough to have triggered the water heater to shut itself off. Thoroughly grossed out, we had to decide what to do. At J's dad's urging (he works on houses) we decided to take all six of us (two humans, two cats and two dogs) to the nearest motel for a couple of days while our landlord sorts it out.

We called around and found somewhere that would take all of us in last night, and we are so glad we did. J's dad told us that if you can smell it at all, the gases can be making you sick, and I'm now sure that they were. I'm really glad that we're now all out of danger. I already feel so much better after a night of fresh air. I think it was affecting me a lot more than I realized, however faint the strange smell had seemed.

We stopped in to grab a couple of things we forgot in our haste to leave last night, and I ran in to the house myself for about two minutes. That was enough to make me feel sick again until I had been breathing fresh air for awhile. I'm not going back in there at all until the sewage is gone and the basement is bleached.

Well, we'd been saying we needed a vacation, right? XD Not quite what we had in mind...