Energy Saving Lightbulbs

Bloody energy-saving lightbulbs, eh? They’ve attracted a lot of chatter lately, and the last thing this debate needs is rabid, misinformed invective from me. But here it is anyway.

For I have vast and unhappy experience of Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), aka energy-saving or long-life bulbs. It started when an electrician skilfully smashed one in our small bathroom, a facility used mostly by the kids who were cavorting barefoot nearby. Naturally, he sloped off without a word, believing perhaps that placing one large shard of glass in the sink was sufficient duty-of-care for one lazy shiftless lifetime, and possibly unaware that (a) CFLs contain mercury and (b) mercury is bad.

That’s when I learned the proper, EPA-approved clean-up procedure for such scenarios. I won’t bore you with the details because well, they’re boring, but highlights include not being allowed to vacuum or brush (because that makes the mercury airborne) and using sticky tape to pick up small fragments and powder (because you’ve got all weekend to do this, right?)

Also, be aware that CFLs don’t play nice with dimmer switches. Don’t use them together, or, bang!, you’ll end up exploding both.

We have a CFL upstairs which has started to flicker. Constantly. It cost €7.99 a few months ago, but now it has to go. Last week I replaced the candle-style CFL in a child’s reading lamp, for €5.99, because it was melting.

Yes, melting. The whole energy-saving point of CFLs is they don’t get hot – unless, it seems, a fly gets incinerated inside their ugly tubular coils, which is what happened here. But c’mon, who knew that insects would fly towards lights? You can’t expect the bulb people to plan for something as rare as that, can you?

In the kitchen, we have an even more expensive “soft” CFL which supposedly replicates the warmer glow of incandescent bulbs. It also replicates their curvy, tasteful, almost mammary appearance. Sadly, however, it fails to replicate the not-being-a-piece-of-crap aspect of old-fashioned bulbs, in that it only works half the time. Weeks will pass without a single lumen – then one day it’s back, shining away. And I can’t throw it out if it’s still semi-working. I’m not made of lightbulbs.

Look, I’m being moderate here. I haven’t mentioned CFLs’ alleged links to epilepsy and migraine, the cancer scares around their ultraviolet emissions, and the distinct probability that the CIA is using radiation to brainwash and seduce our beautiful redheaded women. I’m not a crackpot.

But dammit, I’d rather sit in the dark than clean up after another broken “long-life” bulb.

George Wells

Living Life with a Low-Capacity Battery

The other day, I was struggling, as many of us with chronic illness do, to explain myself to a friend. As usual, I had to give up. I can’t explain to her why it’s not perfectly easy for me to drive in and out of my nearest city (an hour’s drive each way, a quarter of which is on narrow, twisty rural roads) several times – or even once – a week. I’ve tried using the spoon theory, which makes a lot of sense to me, but I don’t seem to be so good at explaining it to others, and people often don’t want to or have the time to follow links and read articles that you send them.

I don’t claim to have invented the battery analogy – I’ve seen it many times before, particularly in connection with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, the neurological disease I suffer from. But today, possibly because I just recently got a new laptop, with a much longer-lasting battery than its predecessor, I suddenly felt like I could use it to make a good explanation of what it’s like to have ME and other chronic illnesses – something that I and others could show to our friends and family members to help them understand.

Imagine two laptops, or smartphones, or tablets. Both have a battery. Each battery can only recharge once in a 24 period. One has a charge that lasts for 20 hours, the other 5 hours. This is a pwME (person with ME) versus a healthy person.

But it gets more complicated than that. There’s something called boom and bust. Imagine a pwME wants to go away for a weekend and be out of bed for 14 hours a day for three days – I’m planning to do this myself in a couple of weeks. (I will be attending a conference: having breakfast in the hotel with friends; going to talks during the day; and having dinner together in the evening.) But that means you need to find 27 extra energy hours somewhere.

Maybe you can use some of those backup battery packs? Maybe you can get 5 hours out of each of them. So, 6 of them should be more than enough, with a few extra hours for emergencies. But they all need to be recharged overnight (19 hours) also.

AND YOU ONLY HAVE ONE CHARGER!!!

So, in order to add those 27 extra hours to your weekend, you are going to have to spend 19 x 6 (114) extra hours in bed. This will obviously have to come out of the five hours a day when you are currently not resting. You do the maths! (I was being rhetorical there, I am actually going to do the maths. 🙂)

114 divided by 5 is almost 23. That’s how many days, at minimum, you will have to be bed bound to recover from your three days of activity. More than 3 weeks. And I am actually being very conservative with the figures here. You could easily add another week to that. And some activities will use up the batteries faster than others, making your energy debt even greater.

That’s how it works. And, although I am writing from my own experience as a pwME, it works the same way for many other chronic illnesses.

So next time you see a chronically ill person attending a party, going out for a day, or even having a weekend away, don’t think to yourself “She must be getting better/he can’t be that bad really/how come they can find the energy to do the things they really want to do?”

Instead, do the maths. Your chronically ill friend will still be paying the price days, weeks, or months afterwards – long after the party, event, or holiday has faded from your memory.

Mary Tynan

Picture of Nearly Empty Battery

Previously published in The Mighty and  Yahoo Lifestyle (as Teresa Ledwith) under the title The Best Analogy to Explain ‘Energy Debt’ With Chronic Illness.