being sick sucks. really sucks.

[rosebee]

After nearly two full weeks later, I'm still hacking & coughing and generally not feeling much better. I feel better than I did 5 days ago (on Friday, things were bad enough I couldn't even get enough lung power to cough).

But I'm still coughing a ton! It's giving my abdominal muscles a fairly good workout though. ;)

Back in to the Dr I went this morning. She said that with my asthma the chest cold that turned into bronchitis really inflamed everything a whole bunch.

So, I'm back on my old friend Prednisone for 6 days. Yuck! :( But it does work. And it'll be nice to start feeling better.

I also got good codine cough medicine. It's the kind that makes you sleepy, so I can't take it at work (which is not fun), but it will (hopefully) mean that I'll be able to get a decent night's sleep tonight.

And now a wonderful story about
'k. This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. In my master bathroom I have a shower curtain rather than sliding doors or anything. When I'm entering & exiting the tub I pull the shower curtain back away from the rear wall & get in. I don't really bother much with the other end of the shower curtain by the front wall (which also happens to be near to where the toilet is). When I moved in almost 2 years ago, I noticed that the baseboard trim on the section of wall behind the toilet (a few feet of wall space between the sink/vanity and the tub) was bending out away from the wall.

I even mentioned to the apartment complex management a few months ago that the baseboard was bending out away from the wall behind my toilet. They had someone come out to fix it. Turns out all they did was simply hammer it back into place. When if they'd stopped to investigate further about *why* it was bending away from the wall they would've found this water leak & mildew problem that much sooner!

I'd noticed a while back that it looked like there was dirt or something on the wall behind the baseboard, but I didn't think anything of it.

Then a couple of days ago I decided to pull back the shower curtain from the front of the wall (since that's the part inside the shower/tub that gets wet, I figured it would help the inside of the tub to dry out faster).

Imagine my horror if you will when I pulled back the curtain and saw a 4" diameter orangey-colored fungus growing on my wall from between the baseboard trim & the wall.

EEEEWWWWWWWWW!!!!!
::shudders::

I grabbed a *bunch* of tissues and used them to break off the fungus from the wall. I put it in the trash and took the trash out to the dumpster immediately.
Then I called my apartment complex management and told them I thought I might have a mold/mildew problem behind my baseboard in my master bath. [can we say understatement?]

So a repairman came out yesterday. When I got home the baseboard trim had been removed and there was the bottom half of an empty bottle of bleach placed underneath the toilet shut-off valve. The section of wall that was covered up by the baseboard? Almost completely covered in little black mold spots. Not to mention the base part of the fungus I pulled off that was still attached to the wall.

Evidently the water shut-off valve for the toilet had been leaking ever so slowly for months & months. Not leaking enough to put a puddle of water on the floor where I'd actually notice it, but just enough to soak the baseboard & the wall behind it... which caused the mold & that nasty-looking fungus to grow.

The mangement company is going to order a new valve, and they're going to come in on Monday and replace the valve, clean up the mold, repaint the drywall, and install a new section of baseboard trim.

I'm just so relieved it wasn't caused by my um... less than white-glove-spotlessly-clean cleaning habits! :)
And even better news the management company was very nice about the whole thing and isn't going to charge/blame me for anything (since the water leakage wasn't anything within my control)! :)

Comments

[rainbow.livejournal.com]

Do you have good airfilters in your apt (or at least bedroom)? Fungus can make bronchitis/asthma/etc much, much worse.