Hello y'all, thanks for checkin out my post. My father and I can be a little vehicle illiterate at times, so apologies if i have a hard time describing certain aspects of the issue. I bought the car last April, and to be perfectly honest I had considered it to be like the best car that Ive ever owned for awhile, so I'm really hoping I can get her back the way she was.

After only a CPL months, my muffler nearly popped
Right off after a minor bump, but it still was able to barely hang on, so a clothes hanger kept it on for the time being.

My dad calls our cousin who either owns an exhaust shop, or he's like the "second in command". But he either didn't explain what we wanted done or just figured shawn would "hook us up" or something. They way it had broken off we figured they'd just replace the muffler part, but of course they instead just went to town, replacing the whole muffler, plus all the piping that was visible underneath all the way to the CAT (should probably add that i have no idea where the cat would be, i used to think it was the big hollow area of the muffler, so im not sure if its normal to replace the cat or if they just stopped at the cat) All in all wound up costing $620~ CAD which neither of us expected, thankfully he covered it for me, but also makes me not want to go to him about the car, I'd rather him think that he was able to pay for it and get it fixed, but i digress.

Shortly after getting the exhaust fixed, i drove outta town for a the afternoon, and while accelerating up this obnoxiously steep and long hill, i started to notice this like, skip? like it'd randomly have to cough or something. Right away i thought perhaps my clutch was slipping, now I have no idea what a slipping clutch feels like which certainly doesn't help but it definitely felt like loss of power briefly like one would imagine would happen if your clutch slipped while climbing a steep hill. Once I got on the highway though it stopped happening and I didn't think about it for some time, until...

Main problemo: things were good for I wanna say a weekish, but one day while driving, it just started feeling "clogged" abruptly. Normal people would probably think it was dying, and pull over, when you it only loses about say 60% of its power, so while its still "drivable" its definitely putting me at risk. id say it sounds more clogged than anything. Like if you compare yourself making engine acceleration sounds that they're supposed to sound like, then instead of doing it cleanly, make the tones while blowing a raspberry, or while rolling your tongue. it just sounds like somethings not getting enough air or gas to me. hopefully i made that comprehensive enough.

At first, it would only happen every once in awhile, but only while the engine was warmed up. even still, if i start it up bright and early on a cold day, it revs cleanly and feels normal until the moment its warmed up and it goes back to running all cloggy. For a while it would only pull this crap intermittently, driving normal for sometimes days. Then one day it was doing it particularly badly and I was also particularly angry at the car at the time, so I probably wasn't being as nice on it as I should have, but it's frustrating having to shift into first regularly throughout any given drive just to try and get some acceleration where you'd normally use 2nd.

At some point I started reving it up pretty high (no red line tho, not that high) hoping to maybe push thru it, only now my exhaust has a huge leak in it again, fairly close to the actual manifold I'd say, tho I'm just going off my ears, and they say it could be coming from underneath the motor kinda area, possibly right before the the CAT, could a clogged converter be a possible suspect? Just today it died randomly due to the o2 sensor at the bottom getting hotter than it could handle and blowing it's fuse, I attempted to just pop a new one in, which died after giving me a very brief sliver of hopefulness.
so I tried finding the second one since the one on the front that's easiest to see appeared to be fine, and yeah, it was looking pretty melty to me, so the exhaust leak must be in that general area I assume.

Also I forget to mention, when it begins to run all clogged sounding, i wind up with A LOT of fumes coming thru the vents, but they dont smell familiar to me in the way that burnt oil, or coolant do. closest thing i could relate it too is MAYBE burnt clutch smell. Its definitely a new fume for me, carwise, but it only happens when the car starts running poorly.
Anywho, sorry for such a long post, i dont really have any mechanics in my life, and its been hard trying to figure it out by googling one symptom at a time. I havent been able to find out what codes its throwing, but i am working on it. i'm sure i left out some valuable info so if you need anything else just ask, and thanks for giving me you're time