02-22-2020, 07:35 AM
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Master Modeler
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by tbzep
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When I was younger (and my lungs were, too), and I could sleep soundly in a room that was redolent of materials such as--or containing--solvents, non-water-based paints, strong acids and bases, noxious products of combustion, and so forth, I considered that ability a matter of pride, but:
Beginning in the late 1990s, when even < 30 milliliter, curing mixtures of polyurethane resin prepolymer and isocyanate made me feel tightness in my chest, I knew that my youth-conferred seeming invincibility in the face of life (as we know it)-hostile chemicals was at an end. Now that my lungs can no longer inflate fully (due to Ankylosing Spondylitis progressively reducing the available chest cavity volume that my lungs can inflate into, by bending my spine and body forward so that I increasingly--in profile--resemble a letter "C"), I am palpably aware of the ambient air and its temperature, pressure, and levels of humidity and included impurities, as even moderately "off-spec" atmospheric parameters now easily make the difference between well-being and wearying, labored breathing. (I have contemplated building [another--I'd built one many years ago] a toy train transformer-powered water-splitting electrolysis machine, to generate clean, comfortably cool oxygen [with the hydrogen being vented outside].) |