Uncle, Already! Uncle!
Know what happens when you have a fever?
You take your temperature.
Same if it’s your kid with the fever. You take his temp.
With a thermometer.
Old-school kind—when the only other alternative is the butt kind and he’s 6.
Know what happens when your kid coughs when the thermometer is in his mouth?
It flies out.
And it shatters on the floor,
into a billion teensy beads of mercury.
Know what happens then?
You call Tina, who is far more level-headed than you in fucked-up moments like this.
Tina consults the interwebs, because she’s smart like that.
The Mercury Spill Clean-Up Procedures are four pages long.
You read them really quickly.
About this time, your baby wakes and starts screaming. But you dare not go in there now, for you have a hazardous spill to deal with before you can let the baby touch the floor.
What do you do then?
You panic a little.
Then you send your kid out of the room. “Yes, go watch TV. Just go.”
You take off all your clothes—cause it says to do so or else you have to throw them away.
You wet paper towels and do your best to scoot all the teensy beads of mercury together into one big droplet.
You get down real close to the ground to find all the beads, thereby ensuring maximum inhalation of dangerous mercury fumes.
You shine a flashlight onto the floor, hoping the mercury will glint in the beam.
You pick up the glass shards and put them into a ziploc bag.
You find some scotch tape and scrape the biggest droplet onto it. Then, you drop the tape and mercury into an empty film canister. Lid on, and it goes into the bag, too.
You use more tape to pick up any straggling bits of death.
You put the bag into another ziploc.
You put that one into another ziploc.
You mop the floor with a disposable mop. The spongy part goes into the bag, too.
You call poison control and explain everything to them. Poison Control Lady says you did everything right and that the mercury in thermometers isn’t the super heinous kind of mercury. She thinks your kid is fine.
You breathe a sigh of relief.
“What is bad about it is the fumes,” she says. Shit! You breathed!
So, you then do what Poison Control Lady says and open all the windows in the house, to air out any poisonous fumes.
Now, you go back to the internet instructions and try to puzzle out why it says to put all that hazardous waste you just created into the garbage. Like, into the landfill. Where it’s bad to have mercury. Then you realize the instructions were written by the New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services. Maybe it’s different there.
You wash your hands. And again.
You go to the screaming, TV-watching children. You assure one of them he won’t die. You change a diaper for the other one.
Epilogue
After further conversations with the kid, you learn that the thermometer flew out of his mouth and broke, not what you had feared: that he had bitten down on it and broken it with his teeth. This makes you feel better.
You go back to the interwebs for more information. You find more information here and here. California Poison Control System has this to say:
“How toxic is elemental mercury?
And by the way, today is fucking FIRED.
August 6, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Oh my flippin god. I missed the out of his mouth part, and I thought he shot the thermometer out his butt. I’m so sorry, I hope this is funny for you in a month.
August 7, 2008 at 12:38 am
Oh dear god, what a day. I’m so sorry to hear it and am sending you all the best thoughts for a better one tomorrow.
August 7, 2008 at 2:11 am
I am sooooooooooooo sorry. You are the best mom ever.
August 7, 2008 at 12:04 pm
If I ever have kids I’m going to call *you* when weird shit happens because you will have dealt with every weird thing under the sun!
August 7, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Interestingly enough Mercury is attracted to pure Silver (chemistry happens here, but I don’t remember what it is, ionic bond blah blah). So if you were to take out a bunch of the silver beads I gave you some years ago and beat them into some sort of a flat shape you could have used the silver to pick up the Mercury with a slightly higher level of confidence you got it all and then just dispose of the Mercury covered Silver as you described. I played with elemental Mercury all the time when I was in high school and I am still around. The world of chemistry is far less deadly than is generally reported.
August 8, 2008 at 1:42 pm
That is teh sux…but I’m glad that you were able to get it all cleaned up and your family, and you, are safe.
When I was training to be a DA (dental asst.) we had to learn how to use Mercury for making metal fillings. Let me tell you what, that is some NASTY stuff to have to deal with, especially if spilled, and the disposal process is, well, convoluted. (Just imagine accidentally spilling a whole ounce of it on a linoleum floor – yeah…our 30-odd student class spent the remainder of our class time helping the teacher clean it up.)
Thankfully, when working out in the field, I never had a DDS that used it on any of their patients. A lot of the older DDS end up dying of Metastatic Brain Cancer from so much inhalation. While the fumes are bad enough, that stuff gets aerosolized when they’re drilling out old metal fillings – dental drills constantly shoot a mixture of air and water onto the drill bits to keep them, and the tooth being worked on, cool. 🙁
August 10, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Actually, I sort of remembered that something like that was possible, but didn’t know what type of metal might do the trick. The instructions I read did say to take off all my jewelery before beginning the cleanup, so I took off my rings.
August 10, 2008 at 10:40 pm
You’re funny!
August 10, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Thank you! Seriously—it helps. Thank you for listening to my bizarre, child-rearing woes. It really helps.
August 10, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Thank you. Sometimes I give myself very low grades.
August 10, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Oh God. I hope I won’t have dealt with EVERYTHING. But I welcome the phone call anytime.
August 10, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Ooh. That sounds like a horrible spill! I hope you won’t encounter the stuff much in your work. Thanks for the sympathy, sister!
August 12, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I remember having a ton of fun playing with mercury in science classes, but I can see how not fun it would be under your circumstances! Sorry, honey.
BTW, I don’t know why it just occurred to me, but did you ever find your keys? They never turned up at my place.