when cleaning (almost) kills

I'm sure no one who knows me would be shocked if I died someday while cleaning. Then they would say "she died doing what she loved". I have had some close calls, mostly involving mattresses that I moved so I could clean them (somehow they always seem to fall on me - I once got wedged behind a queen size mattress and had to call a neighbor to help me).

Anyway, I bought a book about a month ago because I heard the author talking on NPR. Now, I should know better than to listen to 1 minute of a segment about a self professed "clean person" who was talking about her crazy cleaning habits to just go out and buy the book without doing research. But I did.

I hated the book. It was incredibly stupid. The one cleaning tip I picked up wasn't enough to justify buying the damn thing, and the author spent way too much time talking about how bodily fluids on sheets react with bleach (she's having sex when not cleaning, apparently - congrats!). There was a tip on removing poop stains from the sheets if you have a boyfriend with a leaky anus (she also provides a pseudo medical explanation of why men have a leaky anus) but the first time a guy got poop on my sheets would be the last time he ever saw me.

And I was forever annoyed with her "environmentally friendly" cleaning solution - mix vinegar and water. What kind of vinegar? Ratio of vinegar to water? How is that in any way helpful?

Anyway, besides vinegar, the author was obsessed with scrubbing bubbles and how great the product is. And I happened to be in home depot, and always have to go down the cleaning aisle to see what new things they might have, and happened to see scrubbing bubbles so I bought them. I figured I'd give them a try in my shower (which is not really dirty, since it's new, but I love trying new products).

I decided to spray the scrubbing bubbles and then watch an episode of an algebra class I'm taking (subject was moving back and forth between a parabola and a table of values to derive the graphed equation - very interesting). Then I rinsed the scrubbing bubbles (shower did not seem noticeably cleaner - my other product makes the tiles really shiny). I got a little blob of the scrubbing bubbles on my hand so I rinsed it off with water since I'm trying to use less soap since my hands are mangled from wearing gloves every evening to make the sandwich packets. I was kind of pissed that scrubbing bubbles didn't do a great job cleaning and further it smells horrible.

I went back downstairs and started the second algebra lesson. A few minutes into it I noticed that I was suddenly having some problems breathing. Then I looked down at both of my hands and they were swollen and red. So I went in the kitchen and turned on the light and saw I had patches of red all over my arms and that the patches were turning into blisters.

hand swollen, red patch on my wrist is where the blob landed

red patch that was literally spreading before my eyes, spots above are blisters

other arm, with spots and blisters - eventually had a big red patch on this arm too but my hands were too swollen to take another picture

alright, these are kind of shit pics but if you look at my arm compared to my hand, which is swelling, you can see how discolored my hand is - you can also see the red spreading from my hand down my wrist around my fitbit

Having been through the allergy rodeo before I took two benedryl and got into my contaminated shower and rinsed off twice with soap (and re-cleaned the shower the best I could since my hands were totally swollen). Within an hour my breathing was more or less normal and the red patches had started receding so I decided it was best to go to bed. This morning I'm more or less back to normal.

Fucking scrubbing bubbles and fucking book.

In other news, I did manage to finish all the sandwich packets (2,000 of them) so we're good to go for brewgrass tomorrow.

crushed it