Medication preventing me from safely leaving apartment
landlord tenant attorney Virginia Jul 26, 2026
Location: Virginia Hi, so I am currently living in an apartment complex in a city. It is mostly filled with students of a university, but it is not university associated. I renewed my lease in November 2025. In April of this year, I was diagnosed with narcolepsy. Can’t stay awake, and the only medication that has helped me is something called Xywav. It is taken once before bed and once in the middle of the night. It is a powerful central nervous system depressant, causing rapid sedation. If I wake up in the night, I can’t walk 15 feet to my bathroom to use it, without it being unsafe because of how much it disorients me. The apartment building I live in has frequent fire alarms, sometimes in the middle of the night. Mostly because of students smoking or something. My issue is that I live on the 7th floor, and taking this medication would interfere with my ability to safely walk down 7 flights of stairs in the event of the fire alarms going off again. There are no ground units in the building I could move to. Is there some kind of reasonable accommodation my apartment complex could make, or is this something I can break my lease over? It may sound stupid, but the fire alarms are frequent enough that it would be an issue. Part of the original lease I signed was that I cannot break my lease, which I know now was a mistake to sign. My only option is to relet it, unless I can break it over this. I’m just trying to move somewhere where fire alarms won’t be going off in the dead of night, making me risk my life trying to get down some flights of stairs just because idiots like to smoke weed at 5 in the morning and make it everyone else’s problem. I know its sounds stupid and it’s my fault. But I want to know if it is worth trying to use this to be able to move somewhere safer, sooner.
