A Silent Killer in My Home

Aliza Sherman Risdahl

 

I knew something was not right. Deep in my gut, I knew it…

 

I learned a hard lesson this winter about the importance of clean air in my home. I still struggle with the fact that I learned this lesson the hard way and a little too late.

 

In September, my beloved dog Chewie—a black and tan, 10-pound Chihuahua —got sick. Very sick. It was completely unexpected because his most recent Vet visit, a few months earlier, confirmed a clean bill of health. Now his Vet didn't know how to diagnose him other than to say he probably had a brain tumor.

 

Chewie's symptoms included falling down, bumping into walls, walking in circles, and an inability to stand while eating at his dog bowl. Soon he began having mild seizures.

 

The entire time he was sick, I had a nagging feeling that something wasn't right. Yes, I know, my dog was dying, but his decline seemed too sudden. I gave him the medicine my Vet prescribed and provided Chewie with around-the-clock hospice care for three months.

 

Caring for him was particularly challenging because I was several months pregnant with my first child and feeling very ill myself with nausea, headaches and dizziness. Still, I woke up four or five times every night to respond to his cries. I cradled him in my arms like a baby to soothe him.

 

In December, the day before my birthday, I was finally advised to put Chewie to sleep. I didn't know what else to do, so I complied.

 

Several weeks later, in January, my second oldest Chihuahua , Ernie, got sick. He exhibited the exact same symptoms as Chewie: dizziness, bumping into walls, falling down—everything but the seizures.

 

The Vet said that Ernie had a brain tumor. Another brain tumor? How could two unrelated dogs both get brain tumors? I questioned my Vet but was only advised on the next steps: testing, medication, and the inevitable.

 

This time, I watched Ernie closely to see if there was something going on around him that was making him sick. Was he eating a plant that was toxic? Was I using a cleaner that was poisoning him?

 

That is when I noticed that his dizziness increased after he would lay down in front of the heating vent on the living room floor. The Chihuahuas had gotten into the habit of dozing in front of this vent for warmth to replace the sunlight they were missing in winter.

 

Could something be coming through the vent that was making him sick? Something like carbon monoxide?

 

"It couldn't be," my husband said, pointing to our top-of-the-line carbon monoxide detectors. "See," he pointed out, "the reading shows zero carbon monoxide." I looked at the LCD display and the red zero, but still wasn't convinced.

 

As an experiment, I shut off the furnace vent so that Ernie wouldn’t breathe in any air coming up from that vent. Within a week, all of his symptoms were gone. I asked my Vet about getting Ernie tested for carbon monoxide poisoning, but it involved first having to locate a Lab that could do the test. By the time this was done, the carbon monoxide was already out of his system.

 

I thought that was the end of our problems.

 

In March, I went in for an unscheduled sonogram, something I asked for just to make sure everything was okay with my pregnancy.

 

Sonogram technician Villa Guiterrez at Alaska Perinatology in Anchorage examined me.

 

"Do you smoke?" he asked.

 

"No." I replied honestly.

 

"Are you around people who smoke?"

 

"No."

 

"Do you light a fireplace in your home?"

 

"No. Why are you asking me these questions?" I was beginning to get nervous.

 

Villa explained that he saw blood pooling in my placenta. According to him, my placenta at 26 weeks looked like a placenta at the end of a pregnancy. He thought I was a chronic smoker because the blood lakes he described could signify exposure to low levels of carbon monoxide—similar to the amount a smoker would get.

 

Carbon monoxide? But our carbon monoxide detectors in our house read zero.

 

A few days later, I called a furnace company. The furnace guy spent about five minutes checking the house for carbon monoxide with a hand-held detector. Once again, the reading was zero.

 

Then I told him about my dogs. He decided to stay a little longer and turned the furnace up a little higher. Within a few minutes, the numbers on his detector began to rise.

 

"You have carbon monoxide in your house," he said. Off he went to our carbon monoxide detectors (both upstairs and downstairs) to check “peak levels.”

 

Check peak levels? This is when I learned that neither my husband nor I knew how to properly read our carbon monoxide detectors. The furnace guy showed me how to press one of the buttons on the face of the detector to see what numbers were registering that were below the level that would set off the detector alarms. Although the levels he found in our house were not enough to kill my husband or me, they were enough to kill a small pet.

 

"Birds would be the first to go," he said. "Then smaller animals."

 

"What about an infant?" I asked.

 

"Yeah, maybe even an infant."

 

And, clearly, enough to affect my placenta and, possibly, my unborn baby. But why didn't my expensive carbon monoxide detectors go off?

 

The furnace guy explained that carbon monoxide detectors are not set to go off with lower levels of carbon monoxide, just the higher levels that could be deadly to humans. He said that even good detectors—as we had—should be checked for peak levels regularly to see if anything is registering.

 

Long story short: we had the best carbon monoxide detectors on the market but we didn't know how to read them.

 

The next day we had a new furnace installed, the heating vent in the garage sealed off, and, just for good measure, I stopped parking my car in our attached garage for the rest of the winter.

 

Our carbon monoxide detectors now read zero, and when I press their peak buttons each day, they still read zero.

 

However, I still think of poor Chewie, suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning all that time while none of us knew anything about it. People try to comfort me by telling me that Chewie was like a canary in a coalmine: his death was the first signal that something was wrong with the air in our home.

 

I'm not getting as much comfort out of that thought as I should. My dog is dead, and for months nobody believed my suspicions that something was wrong. Several Vets never even mentioned the possibility of carbon monoxide exposure even though I've since heard that it can be a problem in Alaska during the long winters. Even the furnace guy didn't detect anything at first. And my dear husband probably thought I was just getting nervous and paranoid because I was pregnant.

 

But I knew something was not right. Deep in my gut, I knew it despite not having anyone backing me up. I stood by my instincts more out of pure stubbornness than anything else, and I'm so glad I did. Now I know with certainty that we have clean air in our house for our baby, our other pets and ourselves.

 

Lessons learned? Spare no expense on buying the best carbon monoxide detectors on the market and, more importantly, learn how to read them properly. Any carbon monoxide registering in a home is unsafe, no matter how small. Get your furnace checked annually before each winter and serviced if you have a leak. If your furnace is old (ours was 21 years old and most models estimate a 20-year lifespan), invest in a new one. Sure, the extra expense will hurt a tight budget, but life is too precious not to invest in safety.

Aliza Sherman Risdahl is a writer, radio producer and consultant based in Anchorage . She is pregnant with her first child after four miscarriages.