Showering Danger

In my first year of university I was posh and I got in the halls where we had our own en-suite with a shower. This made me happy beyond words, because I do not like sharing toilets/washing facilities with anyone else. Because I am a snob.

Because we did not have a big communal bathroom, we were in charge of keeping our own room clean and tidy. Not a problem. I had lots of bleach and wipes and things and kept it shiny. I cleaned my bathroom often.

This is the story of what happened on one cleaning occasion...

It was about 3am and I was watching Prank Control on my laptop. I was a student and therefore being awake, and watching children’s television on BBC iPlayer at 3 in the morning was totally normal.

I had a sudden and overwhelming desire to clean my bathroom, and then myself. This was not so normal, as usually after Prank Control I caught up on ‘Do Something Different’ with the wonderful duo, Sam and Mark.

Despite my love for Sam,

I went to the bathroom (which, was the size of a large cupboard). Being winter, the heating was up quite high at the time, and the bathroom was very very warm.
Undeterred I started to clean the sink and wipe the mirror. Eventually all I had left to do was put toilet cleaner in the toilet bowl and scrub it a bit. Upon doing this I came to realise that I had come to near the end of the bottle.

There was just a bit more than I needed, but not enough to be saved for the next time.
Therefore I dumped the lot down the toilet and started to run the water for my shower.

Now, my shower was unpredictable at best, and so the water usually ran slightly hotter than was comfortable, and due to the small size of the bathroom it tended to steam up extremely quickly.

Usually - not a problem. Steaming up is what happens in bathrooms. It’s just one of those things.
Apparently it becomes a problem when the said hot steam is in the same room as a large amount of unflushed bleach.
The bleach heated up and mingled with the steam, making some kind of toxic chemical cloud in my bathroom. I, in my shower, was oblivious to this fact until the headache started in.

I had not had much to drink, so I passed it off as dehydration and carried on.

Then came the strange wooziness.

Despite the fact that the room was full of the overpowering stench of bleach, I passed the wooziness off as yet another side effect of not having enough to drink that day. Because I am a fool.

The next sign came in the form of a burning throat and nasal passage. Now, even I could see that not having enough to drink could cause that amount of burning to my insides.

But, if you recall, I am a fool.
So I continued to shower.

I turned around to rinse the back of my hair and a wave of wooziness swept over me.
And I nearly fainted. My knees buckled and I head butted the shower knob.

That was when I realised what must be happening. And it had only taken 3 symptoms and a near death experience.
But, I am a fool. And my hair was full of bubbles.
Was I going to get out of the shower with shampoo in my hair or was I going to risk death by rinsing it out?

Yeah. I stayed.
I also then conditioned and rinsed my hair again before getting out, throwing my window open and collapsing on my bed wrapped in towels, feeling really really sick.

‘What if you had passed out in the shower, fallen and died/drowned?!’ I hear you cry!

Don’t worry. I took precautions against that...


I sat down.


Because I am a winner. Always.