Exploding cans of food, expanding messes...

The chaos phenomenon -- I am feeling challenged and discouraged tonight. My kitchen looks almost as bad as it did when Elaine and I first started our work a week ago. How do I swirl and churn sorted items into chaos so quickly? At least we've carted bushels of stuff out of here, but there is still so much left -- and I've scrambled it again.

As I have tried to put away the assorted stuff we had collected from the counters, table and floor, I've been pulled into other messes. As I open each of my cabinet doors, I am trying to remove excess items for recycling or move to another location. These, too, have ended up recluttering my counters and floors, if I can't immediately find a place for them.

I'm also still struggling to sort the nonkitchen items and prepare them for transport to where they belong. For example, I've started several containers of items intended for the basement -- bicycle parts, pest control items, hardware bits and pieces, tools, etc.

I took photos of my new chaos, but I am too ashamed to post them. I did show them to one of the mental health professionals who is trying to help me. I told him: My father died from Alzheimer's Disease at age 75 -- and he began showing signs of his illness when he was about my age. Could I be experiencing early signs of dementia?

The health professional promised to see about testing me for signs of early dementia. I have already passed some of the simple dementia and memory tests. Later, I tried some additional tests I found online. I seemed disgustingly normal. Does my problem with putting things away result of anxiety, chronic disorganization or some other cognitive impairment?

Exploding cans of food -- Tonight I started trying to put away some canned food we had collected from the counters -- those we had decided to keep. However, when I looked into the appropriate storage cabinet, I found a black mess: A can of tomatoes and a can of pineapple, from two different manufacturers, had both exploded. The explosion had blackened the cans' labels and sprayed black droplets onto the cabinet and shelf liner. 

Immediately, I went to my computer to search the Internet for "exploding cans of food." 

What did I learn? While an exploding can of a fruit or vegetables can be a fairly benign sign of improperly processed, transported or stored food, showing chemical activity and gas production, it can also be a sign of a more serious problem like botulism contamination. 

Fearing the latter, I went into decontamination mode and cleaned out the shelf, its contents and environs with a bleach and water mixture, protecting myself from exposure with an apron and rubber gloves. Even after bleaching, the shelf liner and the contaminated area in the cabinet remained stained with a blackish red stain. The shelf liner is still soaking in bleach water, but I have decided to dispose of the it, and I have repeatedly coated the stain on the cabinet with bleach water.

I read online that botulism can spread to humans through spore exchange in the air, but I had nothing to use in protecting myself from breathing in such spores. I don't know how long botulism spores live.  The cans' contents  had dried out inside, the fruit reduced to some dry, solid chunks. I decided to throw out all of the surrounding cans of the same items from the same manufacturer and any others that looked suspiciously swollen. I rinsed off all the other cans in the bleach water.

I sealed all of the exploded and suspicious cans inside two sets of plastic bags for landfilling. That was what the food safety sources I found on the Internet recommended.

I now smell strongly of bleach.