Hi everyone
I’m 18 weeks pregnant with my first and incredibly excited but also incredibly worried/stressed/anxious. One thing causing me particular anxiety is that we live on the first floor of a terraced house conversion. Our downstairs neighbour constantly chain smokes inside and also constantly smokes weed, also inside, so for about 2 years we have had a problem with both cigarette and weed fumes drifting into our house. It got to the point where it smelt like we lived in a smokers house ourselves, all our belongings etc stink of it. We’ve gone to the expense of operating an air filter/replacing floorboards/filling in any gaps/laying new carpets and even getting both our front doors replaced with draft inhibitors. Sadly we can still smell smoke and weed. The worst is in the shared hallway downstairs but it still gets into our flat. The neighbour herself is a horrible aggressive woman and won’t listen to reason and just tells us to f... off and mind our own business when we have (very politely) explained the situation and tried to reason with her. So unfortunately without taking legal action there is not much we can do until we leave.
So my question/worry is how much damage will the exposure to these second hand fumes be doing to my little one? Can I take comfort that it is just a smell at this stage (bearing I mind the preventive measure last we’ve tried to put in place), as opposed to inhaling damaging fumes? Does anyone have any experience or insight?
The pregnancy was a “pleasant surprise” so it’s all very new to me and we were pretty unprepared for it. Ideally we wouldn’t still be living here had we been ready and it’s gotten to the point that we are preparing to sell up and leave, but obviously that process will take months in itself and I’m worried about potential damage in the meantime.