I was never afraid of swine flu. Even though all the schools were on high alert, threatening to close at any minute. Even though the headlines screamed and the Twitterers Tweeted, I had bigger health scares to fry. Because last week I got the third worst call a homeowner (or renter) can get, right behind “the garage fell into a sink hole” and “the house is on fire.”
Last week my wife called me to say, “Honey, the sewer has backed up into our bedroom.”
Some punk-ass half-baked Mexican virus has nothing on fecal chloroform. Which was slowly filling the bedrooms of our home.
By the time I got to the house, a professional clean-up crew was already deployed, and the worst of the HazMat jumpsuit type cleanup had already been accomplished. The bathrooms had been cleaned. But the carpets. Ugh. The carpets. The damage to our bedroom was obvious and quite fragrant — soaked to the midpoint of the room. But the spillage from the bathrooms seeped into the halls. And from there invaded the kids rooms.
Walking in the kids’ rooms really made me almost ill. Not from physical revulsion, there was little to see or smell other than darkened, damp carpet. But the thought of it. Sewage in their little bedrooms. And the stain was sneaky, hugging walls and creeping into closets. The brightly colored rooms felt defiled.
Within a couple of hours, everything that had been contaminated was bagged and hauled off. Everything else on the floors had been boxed up and stowed in the living room (it looked like we had just started moving in). Furniture was moved and the wet portions of carpet were hacked out and carted away.
When was the last time you slept in your living room? Maybe you don’t want to answer that. That’s where I found myself last week. I was also in my own bed, with my wife. That fact that we were sleeping in our bed should have made the experience more comfortable, but I think we would have been better camping on the floor. Being in the bed in the wrong room was disorienting to say the least.
Did I mention that swallows have nested in our chimney, the wind howls through the ill sitting windows, and that Bubba’s Ikea loft squeaks like the underside of the Congress Avenue Bridge in bat season? Neither of us slept for an instant.
Our bedroom was the first to be re-carpeted and restored, the the two older kids rooms the next day. It took another day or two to get the booked unpacked and to re-move in. It wasn’t until this week that I quit compulsively searching the faces of house guests to see if they were trying to secretly sniff the air. And now things are as back to normal as they ever will be.
If the toilets in your house began flushing in reverse, filling a good portion of your home, could you ever look at the place the same way again? In some way, parenting has inured me against the casually disgusting, but this was pretty horrifying. I think my single self would have walked out and never looked back.
I suppose it also has an impact that I do not own the home (or even pay rent — my wife’s work provides the house — and also the amazing cleanup crew that helped us get it back to live-able so quickly). I’m less invested in the long-term wear and tear than an owner would be. I don’t feel personally slimed. As when the kids poke a hole in the walls or chip the tile, I have a tendency to shrug and think “it’s not my house.”
So as hard it is to imagine, the house was full of poop a few days ago, but things are pretty much back to normal now.
But if that ever happens again, we’re abandoning that place and never coming back.
