Miniscule Marbles of Mercury

Last week, in an attempt to prove to Boy-Child that he was not so sick as to need to stay home from school as he suggested, we threw our most accurate thermometer in his mouth. The intention was to prove no fever, and hustle him off to school. First bell had already rung; he was already in his coat and backpack before he started his complaint.

We all stood in the dark front room, me blocking the doorway into the rest of the house, trying by sheer force of will to get the child out. Virtually every week since Christmas, one or the other child has claimed illness for at least one day; April was a month of serious colds, with sniffles and fevers, and the children have been reluctant to return to regular scheduling.

Boy-Child handed the thermometer to his father, but with the necessary lassitude of a child only well enough to lie on the couch, reading the novel he's currently obsessed with. The thermometer slipped from his fingers, and fell, the glass flashing in the gray morning light. There was a moment when I thought it would land safely on the rug, but it bounced, hit the hard wood floor and shattered.

I said, "That's not so good." Boy-Child screamed in hurt anger as if I had yelled at him (exhibiting the kind of quicksilver sensitivity that for him usually accompanies genuine illness), and raced upstairs to his room. In the urgency of the moment, he was let stay at home and HomoDommi took Girl-Child to school. I, in the meantime, quickly cleaned up the broken glass, trying to reassemble the thermometer to make sure I had located the bulb. 20 minutes later I looked online to find out what to do when you can't find all the thermometer bits, or any of the mercury.

Yes, it had been a now-impossible to purchase, 25-year-old mercury thermometer. We have several digital ones, but from measurement to measurement they can vary up to two degrees, so we use(d) the mercury one for Serious Claims: when the child is not obviously ill and there are conflicting motivations (such as a test at school, or a particularly exciting novel or computer game at home). I should make clear, we have never believed the children were lying about not feeling tip-top; but there is a level of personal discomfort that one learns to ignore when one is not contagious and when duty just ought to be done. And this past school year seems to be one in which the children are having to learn ignore-ance.

Anyway, back to the story. We all know that mercury is bad. I never liked chemistry, and while I have a vague memory of watching a video of mercury shimmying around on a plate, I hadn't paid much attention. Now I know more specifics: mercury is about the most toxic substance on earth, beaten, according to wikipedia, only by plutonium. The Mad Hatter got his name from the madness exhibited by hat-makers, in Victorian England, where mercury was used to felt wool, and people who made hats went genuinely crazy. Luckily, the toxicity builds up over time and exposures, so this one thermometer won't cause lasting harm -- but there are children and small pets in the house, so we wanted to remove as much as possible.

Mercury, the dull silvery self-cohesive solid/liquid, shies away from contact with anything, breaking into smaller cohesive balls if touched. So, the first rule is, Don't Sweep. When I efficiently swept the floor to collect all the pieces of the thermometer, I shattered the single bit of mercury into minute pellets, which bounced and ricocheted across the floor, settling into the grooves of the worn oak and deep into the dusty chasms between floor boards.

The second rule is, Don't Disturb Things any more than possible. The glass bulb, which HomoDommi found much later still containing some mercury, had remained on the carpet. When I thoughtfully rolled up the end of the rug to capture any shards, the bulb skipped over to the far end and split into more microscopic spheres, rolling out, fanning out, over and into the deeper gouges in the floor in front of the outside door on the opposite side of the room.

Most of the balls were small. Really small. HomoDommi inherited our father's amazing visual acuity -- standing, he could see likely specks; lying down with his face inches away, he could confirm them clearly. I, however, could not. Even when handed a needle with a mercury ball on the tip, I was at best able to make out a grayness, a shadow forming an edge of minuscule sphericity. (And that's with my reading glasses on.) Several of the balls that HomoDommi collected, he said, would have slid easily through the eye of a needle. (There's some comment to be made about heaven, rich men and mercury, but I can't seem to articulate it today.)

Touching mercury isn't the health danger -- breathing the fumes it emits is. Copious fumes twist off the stuff, looking under black light like smoke from a lit cigarette. Over two days, HomoDommi spent more than three hours lying on the floor, collecting near-invisible marbles with shaving cream dabbed on the end of a needle. He said, afterward, it would have been easier (and perhaps safer) for him to have licked the floor clean -- which as an added bonus, would have cured him of any rising syphilis, too.

We have the sense he was able to collect the lions-share of the mercury, but not all -- a couple bits had tucked down under the grot between floor boards. Following advice found online, we ended up sprinkling the whole room with garden grade sulphur (available at the better garden centers) -- mercury binds to sulphur and zinc in such a way that it stops fuming. Wet the sulphur dust and mop it up, and you've removed most of the mercury -- and the truly nanoscopic amount remaining down amongst those canyons of worn wood has at least been neutralized. (Sulphur is, itself, toxic in large dusty quantities, but the lesser of two evils.)

Every thing we used in the clean-up -- the broom and dustpan, the mophead, the needles, cotton swabs and three rolls of paper towels, the clothes we were wearing -- and sad to say, the carpet, which could not be salvaged -- had to be taken to the Hazardous Waste Dump.

So the lesson today is, even if you have a perfectly good mercury thermometer around, get rid of it (in some responsible fashion). The clean up is not worth the risk of having it around.

And, by the way, if you pay a little more, you can get a quite accurate digital thermometer. Our new one can prove a child well enough for school in eight seconds flat.