CO & CO2 (poisoning)

This is going to be a longer entry. Sorry. It's taken two months to come to a climax. Well, hopefully a climax.

There's been construction right next door to us in our building at work for around 2 months now. The smell was pretty bad at times. Mostly it smelled like the diesel fumes that you smell when you walk by a truck or bus, only more concentrated to the point of nausea. Every once in a while we could see a haze settle into our office area.
We knew that this couldn't be good, so we complained. Eventually the powers that be sent someone with a gas/fume/noxious gas detector to see if we were okay. For a few weeks (yes, weeks), people would come by and check our air.
One time we hit 29 parts per million for carbon monoxide (CO), but were told that it wasn't at the dangerous 35ppm, so we were fine (as were all had headaches and were sorta woozy). They told us to "open a door." But after 6 weeks of exposure for hours everyday at nearly dangerous levels, that can't be good.

One coworker ended up in the E.R. on Monday night with a terrible headache, etc., that was still strong after 6 hours of being at home. The doctor said that if she had come in immediately after work, they would've had to have done detoxification. (Our head boss found out, yet did nothing. arg.)
This morning another coworker came back from an un-CO-&-CO2-related appointment with her doctor, telling us that he'd done a test and she had dangerous levels of the junk. That was the last straw. Those of us who were left at the office staged an emergency walk-out, since our head boss hadn't responded to a detailed email that we sent on Wednesday.

To top off the walk-out and finally reporting all of this meshigas to Risk Management, four of us went to the E.R. I was pretty sick by this point anyway.
They put me on pure oxygen:
It's unfortunate that the picture doesn't show my awesome new purple shirt that I got for like $6 at Shade.
But the nurse guy named Andy that drew my blood applied a nice purple bandage that matched the shirt:
But I don't think that the reddish-pink bracelet went as well, though:
The doctor said that if my levels were bad enough, I might have to go to the hyperbaric pressure chamber to clear stuff out. So when he told me that my oxygen levels were low enough that I didn't show carbon monoxide poisoning and that now pressure chamber was necessary, I was exceedingly relieved. Then I was discharged feeling a lot better than I had in days. Pure oxygen is great stuff.

After we got back to the temporary office where we'd fled earlier in the day, we found out that when the people came to check the air, they hadn't been checking for all of the chemicals and gases. So the readings had never shown some of the stuff that had been making us so sick.
Idiots. Sorry, I'm just not impressed with our head honcho boss lady right now.

I'm home now and am okay. I am now calling our old office area the "Death Trap."


Further anecdotes:
Remember when I was really sick in December and how right before that I had gone to Denver? Well Twink, Noah and adorable baby Kirra picked me up from the aiport. Then we drove to a Border's. When I got out of the car, I took a few steps and then staggered to the left. I doubled over for a sec until I got my balance back. Now I have motion sickness, but seriously? Anyway, it wasn't until today that I figured out that my sickness in December wasn't a virus at all, but C02 and CO poisoning.

We don't have heat at our office. We were told by the head boss lady: "Good luck figuring out the heat!" So we got space heaters. The only problem with that was that more than 1 heater on low blew the fuse. We were told by the electricians that we couldn't plug in more than 1. So we froze.

Oh, there are more stories, tons more stories. But I should probably stop telling them.