How long for dead mouse smell to go away? (Searched archive, found conflicting info)

[DirtyMartini]

Highly localized, rank smell in living room this morning - I think it is a dead mouse. Fortunately the dc are at nursery today and tomorrow and I am working at home in the kitchen. Will look under/in sofa after bedtime tonight with DP (I am squeamish and do not wish to search alone).

IF we cannot find it and it is under floor/in wall, how long will it take to stop smelling so dreadful? I looked at old threads and of course this has been asked before, but advice varies between seven days and EIGHT WEEKS . And the people who start the threads do not tend to come back and update.

Please tell me, if this happened to you, how long it took?

Rentokil man who visited my workplace told us a week as that's "the time it takes for the body to dry up"

And this is why I would never use poison in the house. Mousetraps everytime.

ZOMBIE THREAD showing in active - I'm assuming Anthony482 was spam, so why don't MNHQ close it to stop this happening?

I'm wondering.... so there is a hole in the bottom of the wall of my room. A long time ago after a mouse appeared in my room I got some of that expanding stuff to fill it in, but the hole was so deep that I didn't manage to fully fill this part in. So instead I have constantly left sticky mouse traps right there, and it has caught all but one of the rodents since. I replace it of course after each time. I have caught like 5-6 mice total in this room, 3-4 caught on the sticky traps I leave there by the hole. The first one was live and was running all around my room, and I said NEVER AGAIN. Hence the constant traps. Another mouse I found lying dead near the entrance to my room, so I think it might've come from the hallway. Not sure how long it was there, I started to notice a little bit of smell one day and thought it was something else, but then randomly walked into my room the next day and suddenly saw it lying there under my table. Removed it immediately. Don't think it had any lingering smell. I believe that one was during the winter. Most of other mice also did not leave a smell but I used to also stick wads of napkins in the hole as an additional barrier, so I'd find the mice stuck inside the napkins. Which probably helped contain the smell. Well, this last time I noticed a dank smell in my room and it did not occur to me that it was anything rotting. This smell continued for maybe a half day or day before I suddenly noticed it lying there fully visible in the corner. Unfortunately, I was getting ready to leave for work and I am usually a little late for work so I wanted to really make sure I was on time this time, so I decided I didn't have time to deal with it right then and went to work on a 6.5-hour evening shift without opening the window or anything. It's September, this was 3 days ago. I come home and immediately dispose of the mouse, but the smell has intensified enormously. I sprayed tons of air freshener in the room, turned on a fan, and opened the window to air it out. The smell decreased a lot from the air freshener, but was still there until maybe last night. I still might have been able to smell it a tiny bit last night while lying in bed. The area closer to the death probably still has the stench, but I don't go to that corner of the room much. However, I have another problem. It's not so much the stench, but the allergic reaction I seem to get to the mice and perhaps also to the noxious rotting gases. I dunno if it's just an allergic reaction or if it's me breathing in toxic gases / bacteria that may be in the area, but I think it's the latter or both. I know when that live mouse was running around my room, it was horrible, everyone in my house was having trouble breathing. That time the smell was clearly of a distinctive rodent flavor. I got a honeywell machine after that to collect rodent particles, but quickly used up the provided filter and haven't invested in a new one yet. I used breathing masks to get through that horrible time. But now I can't really smell the mouse at all and I am still haven't this intense respiratory system reaction. The moment I step into my room, my nose starts running. Within seconds I can feel my throat getting irritated. Sleeping in my room is a pain right now. I guess it is so much worse because it's still warm/hot outside, which caused the mouse to decay much faster. I really, really regret not getting rid of the dead mouse before leaving for work that day. In 7ish hours, it went from dank to horrid and the trouble caused by it probably multiplied by at least 10. I am not worried about the smell, I just want to have my respiratory system cleared up. Opening the window and turning on the fan doesn't seem to have improved things noticeably as far as that goes. I feel like I haven't reached the worst of what's going to happening to my throat/nose/lungs yet, as each night of sleeping in the room I wake up feeling worse and I had the runny nose instantly as I walked in the room an hour ago. I'm afraid the fan is mostly just circulating the bad air around my room, making it worse in the short-term. I don't like having the window totally open because lots of insects come in. I'm considering getting a new filter for my honeywell machine, though I'm kind of afraid to even touch it after all that I put it through before. Those things are expensive. But if things don't improve or at least stop worsening within a few days I think I need to take additional measures. I'm afraid I'm gonna get an infection is there are lots of bacteria in the air.

update: I just walked into my room to open the window back up (I had it only opened a crack for a couple hours bc I can't afford that much AC right now with the heat coming in), and I come back downstairs coughing. this is really bad.