The Night We Nearly Went to Sleep Forever

So a couple of weeks ago, my son’s family’s carbon monoxide detector went off in the middle of the night. My daughter in law admitted that her first reaction was to assume it was a mistake and to shut it off before it woke the kids.  Do you ever think like that? Really.  Did she truly want to wake the kids up?  Get them out of the house at midnight on such a chilly night?  It was November!  In her exhausted state, she was certain that if she went back to sleep it would all be better in the morning.  She didn’t realize it then, but this line of thinking is a symptom of carbon monoxide poisoning.  How do I know that?  First hand experience.

Gratefully her more sensible side prevailed before she allowed herself to fall back asleep.  “What is the point of having a carbon monoxide detector if I’m going to argue with it?” she reasoned.  “Who do you even call at midnight anyway?  Where do I take the kids if we have to leave the house?”  Of course this had to happen during the ONE night her husband was away from home.  Figures!  She called 911.  They told her to get the kids up and get out of the house!  She did.  They all bundled up in the van.  Four little sleepy-heads, not up for an adventure in the wee hours of the morning.  Not much of an adventure anyway, when you’re stuck in car and all the action is going on in the house.  But there WAS a firetruck!  And the firemen WERE wearing masks.  And all those things helped to make the adventure a little more “fun”.  “Fun” bytheway, is all in the eyes of the beholder. 

In the end, it was determined that the exhaust from a running car in the attached garage had filtered through the air and apparently took a couple of hours before it rose to the second level where the family slept and finally set off the alarm.  After an investigation by the gas company and an airing out of the house, it was safe for everyone to go back inside for the last couple hours of sleep – a little wiser for the experience.

Several lessons learned.
1 – car running in the garage with the exhaust pointed toward the inside door – even though the big garage door was open to the fresh evening air …. ooops.
2 – Yes. Pay attention to the carbon monoxide detector and assume it ‘knows’ more than we do about the invisible, odourless, silent killer – carbon monoxide.
3 – GET OUT! Get fresh air.
4 – Call 911
5 – Don’t go back inside till you get the all-clear from a professional.

Know why she didn’t go back to sleep?  Because she remembered hearing something about an experience many years ago that nearly cost us everything that mattered.  The night we very nearly went to sleep forever.  The memory came back, vague as it was, as she laid in a nice warm bed wondering what to do.  It motivated her to get up.

As we chatted about it the next day, that long ago December night came back to me in vivid colour.  Like a movie replaying, where I had a front row seat.  I watched it unfold in slow motion – although the whole event in reality took only a few minutes.

We lived in an old house.  A fixer-upper.  But we had fixed it  up and it was cozy.  And it was ours.  Well, we shared it with the bank.  We lived in a little farming town just south west of Edmonton called Calmar.  My husband commuted to Edmonton.  We had a garden.  I ground wheat to make our bread, just like the “Little Red Hen“.
We had lived there almost five years.  Two of our three children were born during those five years.

It had all the charm of quaint old houses and all of the problems that often come with them too.

Money was tight in those days, but we took on projects as they rose to the top of our priority list and as we could afford them.   During our second summer we re-shingled our roof and re-insulated our walls and roof.  (of course when I say ‘we’, I mean the ‘royal we’, as in “DAN”).  Bytheway, you’d be amazed at how little insulation is actually IN old  houses.  Not much!  No wonder our walls frosted up in the winter.  Original furnace too.  It was kinda neat.  Not very efficient, but waaaaaay cool.  And huge.  Took up half the basement.  Our house was older than my dad!  Which at the time seemed really, really  old.  At least as old as my Gramma’s house where he was born and raised.  Many good memories were lived out in that house.  …. And then again – there is THIS memory.

It had been an unseasonably cold autumn.  The furnace ran all the time it seemed.  I hardly ever left the house in those days anyway – which is a subject for another time.  The house seemed to always have a chill.  We wore sweaters and slippers, but I didn’t mind.  It was part of the charm of living like the Little Red Hen in an old house.  Part of the romance I suppose.  I know right?  What can I say? I was very idealistic in those early years.

I spent a lotta time standing on the heat register, reminded of doing the same thing on chilly mornings when I was a child.  But I had a constant headache.  A dull throb that never seemed to go away.  I suspected it had something to do with the air I was breathing, standing on the heat register – warm air directly from the furnace.  And I wasn’t feeling well most days. Funny why I suspected that.

To be cautious we called our local gas company, and asked if they would come out and check our furnace for possible gas problems.  Perhaps even carbon monoxide I suggested.  This stupid headache!   Calgary Power sent out a service man and he checked our house.   How he did so I have no idea, because he missed a deadly problem that should have hit him right in the face.   Nope.   ‘Nothing amiss‘ he said.   Sorry about your headache but no connection to your furnace.   It was a relief at least to have that nagging question resolved.

Days and weeks passed.   Dan went to work and came home.   The kids and I went for days without leaving the house.   That was just kinda the way I rolled in those days.   As Christmas approached we made plans to go to my folk’s house for the holidays.   In Fort Kent, Alberta.   Another little farming town about four hours northeast.

It was Christmas of 1983.   Our three children were Jacob – five years old, Sarah – four years old and Zack – an infant.   We spent a few wonderful days visiting Gramma and Grampa, cozied up in their comfortable acreage home.   The best way to do winters in Canada. Or at least how I did them.

After a few days, we loaded everyone back into the car and drove home.   Not sure what time we arrived, but it was dark.   And night time.   (Dark doesn’t always mean night time at the end of December up here.)   We were anxious to get the car unloaded and get to bed, but Jacob and Sarah were refreshed from the walk between the car and house, and they wanted to play with their new toys.   Santa had been good to us.   New toys to play with, new books to read.   I let them play while we got settled.   Zack fell asleep as soon as I laid him down.   Huh.   That was unusual for him. 

I became very tired myself and sat in the rocking chair while Dan continued to unload the car.   I was so tired.   Jacob and Sarah soon lost interest in their toys and laid on the floor of the toy room – within my sight line.   I told them to put their toys away and go to bed, but they continued to lay there.   Unusual for them.   Frustrated, and so wanting to go to bed myself, I told them to just go to bed, we’d put everything away in the morning.   They slowly drug themselves off the floor and walked past me to their bedroom.   Tipsy.   Like they were dizzy and couldn’t walk straight.   I became alarmed.   They shouldn’t be this tired.   Come to think of it, neither should I.   I could not get myself off the chair to go check on them.   When Dan finished unloading the car and came into the living room I said “Dan, there’s something very wrong.   Jacob and Sarah wouldn’t listen to me, and when I told them to go to bed, they could hardly walk straight.   And I am. So. Tired.”

Dan went to the basement and came flying back up the stairs. “Cindy!  GET UP.  We have to get out of here.  The house is FULL of carbon monoxide!”  He phoned his dad in St. Albert, a good hour north of us, to see if we could go there.  No cell phones in those days.  “Cindy!  GET UP!  Grab the baby.  We have to get out of here!”  He ran past me to grab an already sleeping child and took them out to the car.  “Cindy! GET UP! Grab the baby!”  He ran past with another sleeping child.

I recall watching him in slow motion, thinking very clearly “I better get up.  …. We need to leave the house. ……  We can’t stay here. …. Yeah.  I need to stand up and go pick up the baby.  I really should help Dan.  … We need to get out of here.”

“CINDY!” he shouted again and ran by with the baby.  “GET UP! I NEED your help.  Grab a suitcase.  We’re going to Dad’s.”  Then he was back for me.  Three sleeping children in the car, he pulled me from the chair and walked me out the back door.  I have a vague recollection of the walk and of getting into the car.  The fresh air was good to breathe.  I hadn’t realized my stupid headache had come back.

Somewhere during that hour’s drive to St. Albert, with my window cracked open and fresh air clearing my head, I said “We could have died.”  There wasn’t anything else to say.  We drove mostly in silence.

Christmas holidays isn’t the easiest time to find someone to replace your furnace, and we imposed on my inlaws longer than we expected, but it didn’t take long to sort out what had been happening in our home while we were gone.  Slowly, over the cold weeks of October and November, our old furnace had been leaking carbon monoxide into our home.  The daily opening and closing of the doors I suppose – of Dan going to work and coming home, had been enough to keep the air from being lethal.  But four days of being closed up tight had filled the house with a higher concentration which literally took only minutes to incapacitate all those within.

What if? What if? 

What if Dan hadn’t been in and out and in and out bringing in luggage and Christmas presents and all the other paraphernalia that fills up a car when you travel with three kids?  What if he’d too said “I’m tired.  Lets go to bed.  We can finish this in the morning.” ?  What if he hadn’t thought to check the furnace?  How could he possibly have known what it meant to find the rusted out chimney?  The image to the left is not our old furnace, but it is the nearest image I could find to illustrate it.  At a certain point a metal pipe exhausts into the brick chimney.  When Dan touched it to check the join, it crumbled in his hand – screaming the horrible truth that the air that should have been leaving the house for all these months, had in fact been staying in the house.

I’ve thought about that young and incompetent Calgary Power repair man from time to time over the years.  Why didn’t he catch it?  Because we trusted him we didn’t trust ourselves when we suspected that we had a “furnace issue”.  He was the expert after all.  What did we know about the price-of-rice-in-China?  That’s why you call a professional.  What else should we have done?  If there is one thing I have learned repeatedly over the years, it is to trust that ‘feeling’, that inner voice that speaks of something amiss.  When someone contradicts that ‘feeling’ – it is better to continue to trust the feeling than the often well meaning person who says otherwise.

We replaced the furnace that week between Christmas and New Years.  It took every dime we had saved for a rainy day.  All Dan’s holiday pay from the whole year of not taking vacation.  Who knew what we had been saving up for?  How grateful we were to have had it.  Grateful for whatever inspiration had prompted us to set it aside. After all, sometimes rainy days are in the middle of winter.  When we finally returned home about a week later, we marvelled at how modern and sleek the new furnace looked.  How little room on the floor it took compared to the old gravity fed octopus of a furnace that had nearly killed us.  It seemed immediately that our air was cleaner.  Fresher.  No more headache.

Soon enough the memory faded.  Tucked away behind the everyday urgencies of life with a growing family.  Every once in awhile I’d hear something on the radio about a family who all died in their sleep.  Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning.  And I would remember.  And I would shiver at all the what-ifs.  I would wonder what their final hours had been like.  Before they all decided to go to bed.  Had they received warnings that they ignored?   Did somebody say “Something isn’t right.  We should get out of here.”  Many years later, we learned of a new fangled thing called a carbon monoxide detector that one could buy and have in their home.  You can bet we own a few.

I’ll tell you what I believe.  I believe in guardian angels.  I don’t believe they have wings.  I think they look pretty much like you or me.  I believe that an angel – one especially assigned to us, stood in our living room and watched those few minutes unfold.  Yes, all that happened in probably less than fifteen or twenty minutes.  I believe he or she had (and still has) a vested interest in us.  He or she loved us, and was very likely related to us.  A wise man named Jeffrey R. Holland told me that in a talk I heard years later, and I knew when I heard it that it was true.  I already had a testimony of it, but the truth of what he said resonated in my heart again as if he spoke directly to ME.  I knew that we had been warned weeks before that night when I first formed the words “carbon monoxide“.  I didn’t even fully comprehend what carbon monoxide was, but the words were meaningful to me nonetheless.  We had been warned repeatedly in various ways, right up till that very night – when we “luckily” decided to get-the-job-of-unpacking-done before retiring for a well deserved winter’s sleep.  I really, truly believe that.  And I thank my Heavenly Father for tender mercies.  I thank Him for allowing two other children to join our family in the years following that night, and for allowing our original three children and their new brothers to grow to adulthood and have children of their own.  I thank Him for paying attention to us, for watching over us.  And I thank Him for guardian angels.

–  –  –  –  –  –  –  –

Carbon Monoxide is a silent, invisible, odourless, ruthless killer.  It is a gas formed by incomplete combustion of carbon.  Although our homes and furnaces are considerably better than they used to be, CM still claims victims every year – especially in the winter time.

Here are some tips to help prevent carbon monoxide from building up in your home:

• install carbon monoxide alarms on all levels of your home and test the alarms regularly
• never idle vehicles in an attached garage, not even with the garage door open
• have your fuel-burning appliances (furnaces, fireplaces, gas dryers) cleaned and checked annually
• contrary to what I once believed, carbon monoxide is not heavier than air, so installing a detector lower on the wall is not helpful. In fact, carbon monoxide is slightly lighter than air and diffuses evenly throughout the room.
• it is recommended to install your detector centrally outside of each separate sleeping area in the immediate vicinity of the bedrooms. If you have more than one sleeping area, then install detectors in all sleeping areas.
• do not install carbon monoxide detectors directly above or beside fuel-burning units such as fire places, wood stoves or gas appliances, as appliances may emit a small amount of carbon monoxide upon start-up.  A carbon monoxide detector should not be placed within fifteen feet of heating or cooking appliances.
• clear snow from all fresh air intake vents, exhaust vents and chimneys
• do not use gas-powered generators, charcoal or propane barbecues/grills, or kerosene stoves indoors, or in closed space.

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE SUFFERING FROM EXPOSURE TO CARBON MONOXIDE?

Symptoms of CM poisoning are tricky.  They are similar to other ailments and are progressive.  They closely resemble the flu.  Initially, you may have a dull headache, feel nauseous, dizzy, weak, a general unwellness that lingers.  Left long enough, you may even start vomiting.  The conditions become worse over time and you may eventually feel chest pains, shortness of breath, trouble thinking clearly, blurred vision, possible convulsions and finally,  loss of consciousnesses.  The poisoning can be fatal.
In my case, I had been feeling symptoms for weeks – no doubt made worse by the fact that I often stood on top of the heat register, breathing the warm air that was blowing up and keeping me warm.   I would sometimes even read while I stood there – completely oblivious to what was coming with that ‘warmth’.   The poisoning was gradual, leading to a continuous state of feeling poorly, but I kinda think that if we’d had such thing as a Carbon Monoxide detector, it would have been screaming!    I hope you have one.   I hope you replace the batteries often enough.   I hope it works!

If for any reason, you suspect carbon monoxide is in your home or people are experiencing symptoms:

• Have a professional come in and check it out.   We did that, and it wasn’t much help – in fact it caused me to second guess myself and gave me a false sense of security.    Trust yourself and how you’re feeling.   Get someone else to check it out.   If you have a CM detector, that IS your professional.
• If your CM detector goes off – GET. OUT!   Leave the house immediately.
• call 911 once everyone is outside
• don’t go back inside till you’ve got the all clear from a professional

My personal advice for those of us who love old houses – REPLACE THE FURNACE.
Old houses might be great, but old furnaces are not.

Warmly,

Cindy Suelzle

footnotes
1.  Jeffrey R. Holland
– Ministry of Angels, Ensign, November 2008, pg 29