As much as my OCD has been mitigated by Zoloft and therapy, contamination fears still do their worst with me from time to time.
Today the landlord sent someone to replace light bulbs that were too high for us to reach without a proper ladder, and in the course of his doing so two of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs that had been in there broke, scattering little pieces of glass AND ALSO MERCURY OH DEAR GOD I’M GOING TO DIE MERCURY across the floor in our living room. I know the relative risks and how small they are…logically. But my faculties of logic typically recuse themselves in the face of environmental, airborne, or ingestible contaminants. In their absence, in rush the forces of emotionally-based panic!
So I canceled my drum lesson this afternoon because I figured it was decent to offer my teacher the chance to avoid my living room for today, although this started me thinking about how, if you’re in a profession where you go to other people’s homes (cleaner, music teacher, tutor…) you have very little control over your environment, and you (me) are more accurately seeking the illusion of control. For all I know, each of my students could have crushed a few CFL bulbs at the kitchen table right before I showed up to discuss geometry.
I think less than the exposure itself – I’m trying to comfort myself, also, with the fact that as a vegetarian I don’t have any mercury exposure from fish – because it’s done and (ha) dusted and can’t be rewound, I’m hung up on the idea of “best practices.”
If you google “what to do if a CFL bulb breaks,” you’ll get an expected mix of “abandon all hope” from way-out-there sites and “aim to follow these steps:” from the EPA website and the like. My problem is that the disclaimer of “Even if you broke a bulb in the past and just vacuumed it up and didn’t follow any of these steps, you are fine – these are just the best practices” only makes me more rabid about needing to follow the best practices. So I opened the windows, turned off the heat, provided stiff cardboard for cleanup and followed it with wet paper towels after the glass bits were gone. I don’t know what I would have done if a bulb had broken over the carpet, because it seems like “best practices” would have been “dispose of the carpet in an enormous, sealed glass jar and take the jar to a hazardous waste facility.”
I think leaving the windows open for a few hours and going over the floor once more with wet paper towels is all I can do, but it’s hard to keep from imagining that when I first walked into the kitchen and saw the glass, I got mercury dust on the bottoms of my socks (I did throw the socks out), and then tracked it into my room…and then will continue to track it elsewhere as if I’m painting a radioactive stripe everywhere I go (and yes, this type of mercury is not radioactive, but I was talking about Marie Curie and the radium girls last night so glowing trails are on my mind…). It’s difficult not to want to follow every last best practice, to aim for a total purity that doesn’t exist, to be perfectly safe. But I know my time is better spent doing what I can and working on how to cope with that being enough. Illogically, the incident has made the unbroken CFL bulbs I have waiting for a recycling event seem like little grenades sitting in my room waiting to explode, so now they’re in bubble wrap ready to be taken to Home Depot.
And “Marie Curie” really sounds like mercury.
