Our Scary Campfire Stories

We've been having a great time here in California, but that hasn't come without some tough times. In fact we had to two pretty scary incidents during our stay here. These aren't scary campfire stories in the traditional sense of the phrase. But they were still pretty scary for us.

The first incident happened on the first morning of our stay in the round house. Both Katie and I woke up feeling pretty terrible. We didn't fully know why. Our best guess was that our bed was positioned such that our heads were below our feet all night due to the slant of the floor. Well shortly after Katie got up and moving she got really dizzy, passed out, and fell to the floor. She came to pretty quickly but was in a lot of pain due to both the fall and the swirling headache she had from before. She was also pretty scared since she couldn't fully remember what had happened. I did my best to take care of her, which mostly involved keeping her hydrated, fed, and warm. I also brought her some pain medicine, kept her awake and talking, opened up windows to bring in fresh air, and slowly helped her through various stages of sitting up. After taking care of her through the morning and into the afternoon, it appeared there was no serious damage other than a possible concussion, so we concluded there was no need to go see a doctor unless her symptoms worsened. Luckily they did not and her condition significantly improved by the next day.

Needless to say we moved our bed and the rest of the week we did not run into any issues. So we thought our conclusion about the incline of the floor was correct. Well fast-forward to this past Monday and we again woke up feeling pretty terrible. We didn't put two and two together because while we were laying down our headaches were pretty dull, but once we got up Katie felt the same symptoms she had before and panicked. The last time was so incredibly scary it understandably freaked her out. But at least this time we kind of knew what to expect so I kept her sitting in a safe position while we did all the same things we did before to help her get better. Huzzah for being more on top things! Well kinda...

Unfortunately while I was running around in a slightly panicked state trying to take care of her, I was ignoring my own symptoms and eventually blacked out myself. Sigh. The funny and probably slightly scarier thing was that I did not think I had blacked out. I had already been up for a good hour and had even showered. I just remember feeling very dizzy as I was running around getting stuff for Katie. My legs felt a bit wobbly and weak so I leaned back against the wall and sat myself onto the floor. I sat there a few seconds and eventually called out to Katie to see if she was doing okay, but what freaked me out was that she was not in the place I had last left her, or so I could remember. Not good. I eventually crawled my way back to bed to rest. 

Luckily I did not have a major fall and was in much less pain than what Katie experienced the first time. Also luckily by the time this happened Katie's condition had improved quite a bit and she was able carefully take of herself and me. It took quite a bit longer for me to recover because apparently recovering from blacking out is a long process regardless of if you fell or not. It seems as though my body is better at holding out against such things, but then takes longer to recover once it all catches up to me.

Given that we had already corrected for the slant of the floor, our next best guess to the cause of all this was that we had just experienced carbon monoxide poisoning or something related to lack of oxygen. In both incidents we had got our wood-fire stove going really well before we went to bed to keep the house warm and in both cases we had not kept windows open or plugged in the carbon monoxide alarm. To be fair I didn't know about the alarm the first night. But once I did, it went off a couple times in the night that first week. I thought it was due to my poor fire building skills. The fix was to keep windows open if I got any smoke in the house while building the fire. But I started the fire so well the night before that second incident that I never bother to open the windows and just plum forgot to plug the alarm back in after being gone all weekend. Apparently at least one of those two things needed to happen. Alas... lesson learned. 

We are at least alive, safe and healthy again. Our plan is to no longer use the wood-fire stove at night since we think something is wrong with its ventilation system. Instead we plan to use a space heater we borrowed from Becky and if need be, just be cold if the space heater isn't enough. We've at least had some warmer nights recently while we adjust to the new routine. We are though hoping for no more scary incidents, especially like the ones as of recent involving fire/smoke/lack of oxygen, to happen ever again.