Would you be freaking out about this?

niknak1208 · November 2014

Good Morning Ladies. I hope all is well with everyone! I'm freaking myself out quite a bit and I'm not sure if I should be. Last weekend we had my daughter's 2nd birthday party at the house. We ordered a big platter of wings from a wing joint in town. It came on a big plastic platter and my kitchen is really tiny so we shoved the lid in the oven which was off.. for lack of a place to put it. We happened to not use the actual oven all week until Thursday.. we had just been cooking on the stovetop and I forgot that the plastic lid was in the oven until I saw it melted on the lower rack. I had the oven at 350 that night so it never really smoked or smelled or anything and then I took dinner out.. shut it off and forgot AGAIN! So the next time I had the oven at 400 and it did smoke.. quite a bit.. it didn't really stink stink but it was smoking. I opened the windows and then I finally took the lower rack out and put it outside on the deck thinking it would get really cold and pop off.. and it did.. worked like a charm. But there was still run over on the bottom of the oven. So i tried putting the oven on self clean. It literally smoked up the house. I opened windows and the kids and I went down to the playroom in the basement just trying to not be around it. Finally I turned it off because it was just too much.

I am really worried about having breathed that in and my kids breathing it in too. It didn't really have a scent. And I took it out as soon as I remembered.. but it was more the self-cleaning smoke that's freaking me out.

I feel fine.. the kids feel fine.. should I be worried about this? I just have myself antsy about it because I'm not quite 11 weeks and it's still first trimester.. Ugh.. I'm just nervous and I just want me and my babies to all be ok. I wish I never would have put the oven on clean. We ended up putting it at 350 later with a pot of water in there for 2 hours.. and that worked like a charm.. all the yucks fell off the bottom of the oven and nothing got smokey at all.

Tsuga76 · November 2014

I have so been there. When I was only about 5 or 6 weeks I worked two (partial) days in a space adjacent to a print shop and there was a noticeable fume smell in the office. I got really worried that I had exposed myself and the baby to toxic solvents and was mad at myself for not just walking out the first day. But I finally determined two things: 1) no, it probably wasn't ideal but that degree of low level exposure is hardly the level of full, prolonged occupational exposure where significant problems are known to occur plus I was probably more sensitive to the smell than normal and 2) there was nothing I could do about it at that point so worrying about it wasn't going to help anything.

I decided to just be more careful in the future and let it go.

Yeah, burning plastic is bad. But sounds like your exposure was brief, and you did the right thing by ventilating and moving to the basement - I can't imagine much smoke got down there. Just try to be more careful in the future, and I'm sure everything will be fine.

niknak1208 · November 2014

Thank You! You're probably right! I kept trying to tell myself that but you just get yourself so worried and worked up. I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it all night long. The kids seemed totally unaffected by it..they just thought it was fun to be in the basement but I kept thinking.. holy cow there's 3 more hours on this oven.. no way am I hanging out down here for 3 more hours! lol That's when I turned it off and opened more windows and stayed down until it was mostly clear.

Moral of the story- I will never do that again!

tahitiandreamin · November 2014

It sounds like you avoided the fumes as best you could/ I'm sure that you didn't actually have that much exposure and that everything is fine. Just think about what we were exposed to as kids back in the 70s...