how i saved us all from brake fluid

it all comes down to my nose. i have an absurdly keen sense of smell. i once detected something noxious at my mother's house, something no one else could smell but that made me ill every time i entered. it took six months of my complaining before anyone else began to smell it, and she finally tracked it down to the freezer (where i had been telling her it was coming from, but nooooooo, she didn't believe me), where a very old package of frozen broccoli spears had gone over to the dark side.

my sensitive nose has always driven my family crazy, and it's been no picnic for justin, either, especially with my sense of smell becoming even more impossibly sharp in pregnancy. but today, it saved our very lives.

or it would have, had there been something actually threatening in the house.

the smell was so strong (to me, at least) that it woke me this morning, just before five. it was a horrible, toxic, chemical-y smell that stung my nasal passages and got me awake enough to realize i was awake in the dark without needing to go to the bathroom (for once) and not because i was hot (as i always am). i struggled to identify it. was the city spraying for mosquitoes, and had our bedroom a/c sucked in the clouds of poison being sprayed on the street? had something crawled into the vent hose of the same a/c and died? had the a/c itself gone haywire?

the smell only grew stronger, and while i felt fine (if tired) i began to obsess over what might be happening to milo, the longer i inhaled the fumes, so i woke up justin (much to his delight, i'm sure). he was a little stopped up (maybe from me blasting the a/c on him all night), so he couldn't smell it, but he got up to check it out. a few minutes later, he called to me from the basement.

as i went down to the first floor, the smell became stronger, and when i entered the basement stairwell, i about fell over. we isolated the smell to one quadrant of our basement but couldn't figure out what was causing it, so we got the hell out and justin called the fire department. they came immediately, lights blazing and sirens blaring (which was a little embarrassing), and three of them jumped out of the truck to investigate with justin while i waited on the front porch.

but even our burly neighborhood heroes couldn't figure out what it was. they suggested justin clear out every chemical substance in our basement (and the containers of cleaners and painting-related products and household repair substances with which we would have no idea what to do but which were left behind by the previous owners of the house nonetheless - they were legion) and see if that helped, and if not to get the city to see if someone in the neighborhood had flushed something toxic down the drain that was backing up on us.

justin asked me to call labor & delivery while he cleared out the basement - and let's be honest: he's the real hero in this story. he made multiple trips into the belly of the beast to save us from what turned out to be an old bottle of brake fluid that must have spontaneously combusted after years of languishing in our basement, sometime after 2:30 this morning (which was the last time i got up to get my piss on before the smell seeped upstairs). he cleared everything else out anyway, and dragged an old set of metal shelves on which the brake fluid had leaked out to the curb for the garbage collectors, and scrupulously cleaned up any vestiges of brake fluid from the basement to make it safe for me (and milo) to go back inside, and opened all the windows and turned on all the fans and exhaust fans and both the a/c units. did i mention he did not complain once? not about me waking him, and not about me being overly sensitive, and not about having to clean the basement at 5:30 am. okay, he did complain- once - because he got his father's day cavalier shirt dirty in the process.

i suppose now i must keep him.

the attending in labor & delivery quickly cleared up my concerns, thank goodness, but it was scary. in the end, it wasn't such a big deal, although if we had sniffed it long enough i suppose it could have been a problem. but the thought that it could have been a big deal - a big fat hairy smelly deal - rattled me. to have come so close and to have lost milo through something so absurd now: just unthinkable.

it was 6:30 before it was clear to go back in the house. the alarm was set for 8:00, but we weren't going to get much sleep now, so we went ahead and showered and then we went out for breakfast to a strangely festive IHOP that was blaring old kinks songs at 7 am, where we had a big breakfast to fortify us for our sleep-deprived day and then went to the hospital for today's NST, which went fine ("i can always count on your baby to cooperate!" - the fetal diagnostic peri).

i have barely stayed awake all day; frankly, i probably shouldn't have driven myself to work considering how hard it was to keep my eyes open. but it's just starting to rain now, and we can sleep in tomorrow, together, with the rain as a backdrop, and we are both still breathing, and milo is still kicking.