Life's a Gas

So, I'd been feeling physically ill since I moved to Los Angeles. Most evenings in the apartment came complete with a throbbing headache and increasing nausea. The evening of New Year's day was spent locked in the toilet. Scott and I considered various explanations for this, the two most likely being food poisoning from the cheap Thai restaurant that we visited on NYE, and some sort of psychosmatic illness based on the fact that I don't really like it here.

Plagued by this low-level illness (and by the fact that Scott refused to let me see a doctor due to the lack of medical insurance), I was not too happy at being left on my own for two days while the husband went of to work in San Diego. Knowing that I was miserable and cold, he gave me intense instruction in how to opearate the TV (trickier than you would imagine) and the archaic 1920s heating system. I mastered the TV, but was too scared to use the radiator (which one has to light with a match), and instead snuggled under blankets. This turned out to be a very, very, good thing.

Yesterday I called in the gas man, as one of the rings on the oven (also, it seems from the 1920s) was not working. We had a nice chat (he also an immigrant), and while here he said he would check the heating system for me. Which I thought was nice of him.

After spending 10 minutes or so lighting matches and fiddling with switches, he turned to me with a grave look on his face, and asked when we had last had the heating on. I told him it had been a few days ago. He asked if I had been having headaches or been feeling sick. Why yes I had. He then turns to me sternly, and tells me not to use it again because "if you switch on you go to to sleep and not wake up". Turns out it is leaking huge amounts of carbon monoxide into the living room, and the only reason that we're not already dead is that a lot of our windows are broken, which provided a bit of life-saving ventilation.

Strangely, it almost pleased me to find this out. Clearly it's not good that we were almost poisoned. However, it is nice to know that my body was going mental for a reason, and not just because I'm having a nervous breakdown. It also explains why Scott has found his memory and concentration failing whenever he is in the flat. So people, if you too live in an apartment with antiquted heating systems, a crazy landlady that has no interest in fixing stuff, and find yourself suffering from mystery illnesses, it really is worth taking the time to make sure you're not being poisoned...