Anchorage family finds out they had a silent killer in the house

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A silent killer in my house

By Aliza Sherman

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

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

In September 2005, while I was pregnant with my daughter, my beloved dog Chewie — a black and tan, 10-pound Chihuahua — got sick. Very sick. The illness was completely unexpected because his most recent veterinary 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 was emotional because my dog was dying, but his decline seemed too sudden. I gave Chewie the medicine my vet prescribed and provided him with around-the-clock hospice care for three months.

Caring for him was particularly challenging because I was several months pregnant and suffering from nausea, headaches and dizziness. Still, I woke up four or five times each night to respond to Chewie’s cries. I cradled him in my arms like a baby to soothe him.

In December, the day after Chewie had an uncontrollable seizure during my birthday party, I was finally advised to put him to sleep. I didn’t know what else to do, so I complied.

Several weeks later, in January 2006, my second oldest Chihuahua, Ernie, fell ill. 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 given possible next steps: testing, medication, and then 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 a heating vent on the living

room floor. All three of my Chihuahuas spent the winters dozing in front of this vent for warmth to replace the sunlight they were missing.

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

“It couldn’t be carbon monoxide,” my husband said, pointing to our top-ofthe-line detector plugged into the wall nearby. “See, it 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 couldn’t breathe in any air coming up from that vent. Within a week, the worst 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 laboratory that could administer the test. By the time I found one, the carbon monoxide was already out of his system.

Not the end of the trouble

In March, I went in for an unscheduled sonogram, something I asked for just to make sure everything was OK with my pregnancy, a bit paranoid after multiple losses.

The sonogram technician 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.

The technician explained that he saw blood pooling in my placenta. Apparently 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 take in.

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 listened patiently, then looked at my pregnant belly.

“My wife’s pregnant, too.” he said.

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.

He then went over 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.”

There was enough carbon monoxide in my house to make me nauseous and dizzy in my fifth month of pregnancy, enough to damage my placenta and possibly affect my unborn child.

A lesson in detectors

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.

It turns out we had the best carbon monoxide detectors on the market but that 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 pressed the peak button each day, they still read zero.

I still think of my poor dog, Chewie, suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning all that time while none of us knew what was going on. People try to comfort me by telling me that Chewie was a canary in a coal mine: His death was the first signal that something was wrong with the air in our home and possibly saved our baby.

The lessons to be learned from this?

Spare no expense when buying the carbon monoxide detectors, 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.

And most of all? Trust your gut.

Aliza Sherman is a freelance writer in Anchorage. Comments about this story? Email editor@AlaskaPulse. com.

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