The Highly Unlikely Tale of Pneumonia and Three Dead Mice

Whoever coined the phrase, “quiet at a mouse”, has obviously never been woken in the middle of the night by a mouse having a party in a plastic bag.

Mice and I have an ugly history, and it starts thusly.

When Jordan was about six months old, I found a recliner on the street.  I know, that statement alone is like the dumb girl in a horror movie in a broken-down car on the side of the highway at night, who decides to get out of the car.  This leaves the whole audience shaking their heads because they all know it’s a mistake that will no doubt end in the reason she got the part…a blood curdling scream.  There is screaming in this story too.

In Germany, the active duty military families lived in apartments we called stairwell housing.  This is basically a giant apartment building broken into three sets of eight apartments, each accessible only by their stairwell.  They were very large and lovely apartments…minus the neighbors.  When you found yourself with furniture or something large you didn’t want anymore, you carried it outside to a designated location for your building on a little something we called bulk trash day.  Then the trash men came and took it away.  Anyone who has lived in a military community knows that bulk trash day is the best.  If you need something, you are most likely going to find it, and if you need to get rid of something, you don’t have to go far.  Since military people move so often, and they have weight limits on what they can move, they get rid of all kinds of stuff when they go to their next base.  On this particular bulk trash day, I spotted an ugly, but very comfortable looking recliner.  I had been wanting one forever…like two months.  I told my husband about my discovery, but he was less than enthusiastic and refused to get it for me.  Since I am not one to be dissuaded from something I want just because someone else isn’t excited, I put Jordan on my hip and went downstairs to fetch my chair.  I checked it out.  Sat in it.  Rocked in it.  Made sure it worked and wasn’t nasty.  It looked to be in pretty good condition, so I grabbed it and started dragging.  I dragged it across the street, down the sidewalk, into the stairwell, and up five flights of stairs to the third floor, with a twenty-pound baby on my hip.  I am determined, if nothing else.  I vacuumed it, and since a shampooer was far too much of a luxury to even be added to my dream list of future purchases, I covered it with a clean sheet and put it in the corner.  I loved that stupid chair.

A couple of years later, after I had Elaine, I decided to reupholster all of my furniture, because I was ambitious and naïve back then.  I found the most adorable striped canvas upholstery fabric at IKEA and made it mine.  The couch turned out amazing, in spite of my inexperience.  The chair was last.   I  couldn’t wait to have it finished because it would be just like a brand-new rocking recliner, which is even better than a free rocking recliner.  In order to replace fabric I had to take it completely apart and reupholster a piece at a time.  When I removed the back of the chair, I discovered, to my absolute horror, it was FULL of mouse poo.  Queue the screaming.  I had sat in that chair for two years, rocking my babies, reading, watching tv, and even falling asleep.  All the while, there were piles of mouse diddle along for the ride!  Having never encountered anything remotely like this before, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable that would make the horribleness disappear.  I grabbed the vacuum and got to work.  Shortly after that, I found myself in excruciating pain in the emergency room.  Diagnosis, pneumonia, in August.  The doctor couldn’t believe his own eyes.  He came in room after my x-rays and started to speak…then stopped and put the x-rays up on the screen…then hmmm’d an affirmation…then walked out of the room with the x-rays…then came back and put them up on the screen and stared at them a while longer, before turning to me and saying that I indeed had pneumonia.  It was almost unheard of that time of year, but there it was.  Pneumonia caused by exposure to bacteria carried in mouse feces that was blown out into the air as I vacuumed it up.  Not only did I sit on mouse disease for two years, I had then breathed it in and had it attack me from the inside.  I learned a valuable lesson, but no, it was not to leave old furniture on the side of the road where it belongs.  I still shopped off the sidewalk for a couple more years before we left Germany.

When I first moved into this house, I was alone.  All the kids were still living with family, finishing out the semester of school.  One night, I woke in the middle of the night to a rustling sound coming from downstairs.  I immediately thought someone was in the house.  Of course, I panicked.  Not having any way to defend myself, I started going through the list of potential defense weapons I possessed in my bedroom.   No guns, no bat, nothing good for clubbing someone…so I resorted to the one thing I knew.  I grabbed a flip flop.  This has proven very effective on a mouthy teenage boy…maybe I could stun the intruder long enough to escape.  I mean honestly, who breaks into a house and expects to get slapped with a slip on??  So, there I was in the dark, armed with my favorite summer shoe, creeping down the stairs.  About halfway down, the rustling starts again.  Panicked and hardly able to hear above my own beating heart, I contemplate calling the police…or a friend…or my mom.  But I hadn’t heard any footsteps, and what kind of a burglar just fishes around in the pantry for a midnight snack.  So, I kept going.  My mind was reeling.  A raccoon?  A stray cat?  What could have gotten into the house?  Did I mistakenly leave a door open?  Would a flip flop be effective against a rabid racoon? What would the police say if I call them for a racoon?  After all, I had survived a skunk in my house in Missouri…did I really need the police to save me from a little racoon?  On I crept…wondering if this was what I had to look forward to for the rest of my life?  As I arrived at the bottom, I could tell the noise was coming from the basement.  I quietly reached around the corner and opened the basement door. The sound abruptly stopped.  I flipped on the light and saw a plastic bag sitting on the landing of the basement stairs.  I went down the stairs to investigate further and discovered mouse poo in the bag.  A mouse?!?  How could a little mouse make all that racket?  Finding no evidence of a serial killer, or racoon in the basement, I went back to bed…never so grateful that I hadn’t bothered anyone else with my problems!  I contemplated the reaction of the police if I had called them for a mouse.  I decided it is too soon in life to get the reputation of the lonely widow who calls the cops for midnight conversation.  Yep, I was going to have to deal with this rodent issue on my own.

Having decided I needed to get tough on my mouse problem, I went to Home Depot and purchased a large supply of Decon, more than I ever dreamed I would need.  I placed little green cakes of mouse poison in the garage and all over the basement, where I believed they were coming in.  Weeks later, most of the cake was gone, so I refilled it.  More weeks later, I found myself in the basement going through boxes.  There was evidence of mouse activity everywhere I went.  Imagine my dismay when I moved a stack of boxes and discovered a pile of green mouse turds.  How were they pooping poison?  Weren’t they supposed to keel over dead after a bite?  I quickly surmised that not only had the poison not worked, but that I had Mighty Mouse leaving radioactive pellets for me to discover.  Or maybe these weren’t mice, maybe it was worse.  Rats.  Maybe mouse poison didn’t work on rats.  I was finishing up the last of the boxes when I had my first face to face encounter.  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.  I whipped my head around to see what it was, and there, much to my great relief was not a radioactive super mouse or a rat.  It was this sweet, tiny little mouse sitting in the corner watching me.  He wasn’t even a boring pet store mouse.  No, no.  He had a tiny little face and big round ears, sitting on his back legs with his little front paws folded in front like hands.  It was Jerry…as in Tom and Jerry.  Sitting there, waiting, like he was expecting something from me.  I felt a twinge of guilt as I said in my sweetest voice ever, “Hi little mouse!  Want some more cake??”  A couple of days later, I had a similar encounter in the garage. It was then I decided I needed to start shopping for an exterminator.  Late one evening before the exterminator had a chance to come assess my problem, Elaine came into my room and very calmly announced there were two dead mice in the basement and she had almost stepped on them.  She must get that from her father, heaven knows if I had nearly stepped on a dead mouse the whole house and the neighbors would have heard about if before I had a chance to let them know there was no murderer chasing me.  I had the mice removed by a braver soul than myself and went back to the basement to assess the situation, thinking that finally, this nightmare must be over.  Since I have no desire to repeat the pneumonia thing, I arranged to have the basement cleaned.  I was trying to ascertain just how many areas were going to need sanitized, since the dead mice were found nowhere near the area where the poisoned cakes were placed, and there it was…the third dead mouse.  My go to response to fear kicked in and I ran…like the wind.  I’m pretty sure I leaped up the stairs.  In my mind, it was a giant dead mouse and I wanted no part of it.  I stood breathless at the top of the stairs wondering why I ran…but there I was…having triumphed over the mice and had reclaimed my basement for myself, so I did the only thing that came to mind.  I raised a fist to the air and yelled, “Victory is MINE!”  Thankfully, no one was home to witness it.