A scare

January 30, 2010

A scare

This week has been the most rubbish week i can remember having in a long time - i've been feeling pissy and moody and stressed and down anyway due to the preggie hormones, i've now got a cold, i've been having morning sickness to the point where i actually throw up pretty much every day, work has been difficult, and then to top it all off we started having problems with our gas.

It began on Wednesday when we realised there was something wrong with the gas meter because it had credit on it but wasn't giving us any gas, so Sir called the helpline number and after having to phone a couple of other numbers, press '1' for this option, '3' for the other, wait on hold for ages, etc, etc, eventually got through to someone who sent out a gas engineer to take a look for us. He fitted a new gas meter, and everything was going great until the time when he needed to check our gas appliances and found that our gas cooker was giving off carbon monoxide every time we turned the hobs on. This meant we would have been slowly poisoned by it, but we had no way of knowing how long it had been going on for, how much we had breathed in, etc. And on top of all that he had to disable the gas meter and issued us with a warning notice for having an 'immediately dangerous' appliance in the house. So still no gas, therefore no heating or cooker.....

Sir managed to get a gas safety engineer out to us on Friday (after having suffered for 2 freezing cold nights with no heating), and he disconnected the cooker and turned the meter back on for us. Great news, now all we had to do is order a new cooker and get it fitted, but hold on...... the gas safety engineer detects a gas leak coming from faulty pipes somewhere, so has to turn the meter off again. So, still no heating, plus we have carbon monoxide poisoning and have been breathing in gas fumes on top of that for who knows how long.

So Sir has been ringing round people since then trying to get someone to come out and fix the leak and replace the faulty gas pipes, but so far the earliest He can get someone is Tuesday. Which will mean we have been in a house with no heating or cooker for a week in freezing cold weather. Sir is going absolutely nuts about this, yelling at the gas company down the phone about how we have a 20 month old baby and a pregnant woman in the house, but it hasn't seemed to make any difference. So we have been spending as much time out of the house as possible during the day, and sitting in bed during the evenings, where Poppy has a portable electric heater in there and we have an electric blanket in our bed. It's still cold though and pretty miserable.

And Poppy and i had to go to the doctor to get checked out for carbon monoxide poisoning. The tests came back showing only low levels in both our blood, so it shouldn't have done us very much harm and my unborn baby should be ok too. It's given me quite a scare though, and i keep asking Sir if we can get an electric cooker instead now, but He prefers cooking on gas so we're going to get carbon monoxide detectors for the house so at least we'll know next time there's a leak.

So a rubbish week overall. Hopefully next week will be better....