VOCs, a lesson in commercial construction/remodeling.
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DilettanteUser is Offline
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09 Aug 2018 05:53 AM
Okay, don't really talk about myself much.  But one of my little "sidelines" is that I'm a minority shareholder in a gaming company (tabletop, card games, board games, RPGs, etc).

As such, I work a couple of conventions in the midwest every year.

This year at GenCon (largest gaming industry convention on the planet, 100K people, etc) there was a medical incident with a 6-time NY Times Best Selling Author.

The hotel she was staying at had recently finished a 2 year remodeling cycle.  Basically they tore everything out back to the steel frame and concrete and rebuilt.
She'd been put up in one of the most recently upgraded rooms.

The first evening she broke out in hives.
She went to bed that evening and woke up the next morning feeling as if she'd gotten no sleep at all.
So she dozed off for an hour and woke up again feeling even worse.  Lost of balance, slurred speech, hallucinations, etc.
Luckily she was able to call the front desk for help and she was put on an ambulance to a nearby hospital.

On presentation, it appeared as if she'd had a stroke.  Facial droop, slurred speech, loss of cognition in her ability to "find" words.

EKG, EEG and MRI all came back clean.
So she was admitted.

After a night in the hospital, her symptoms COMPLETELY disappeared, save for a mild headache.

After talking with the doctors and the hotel staff, it's believed that she was admitted with VOC poisoning.
The hotel stepped up and moved her off to a room that had been renovated much earlier in the upgrade cycle.
And only after they had the room VIGOROUSLY cleaned and aired out with fans.
I was one of the people who helped move her to the "new" room.
The original had a distinct odor about it.

The "new" room had no such odor, and she made it through the rest of the convention without incident.

No real point to this, other than as an illustration about how air quality is starting to matter a LOT more in tight new construction and remodels.  Especially in institutional settings like hotels, where the majority of the air is recirculated, rather than fresh.
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