With the recent cold and ice, along with the downturn in the economy, home heating has become an issue.
Some friends brought in a woman who had a headache and was throwing up. She had a generator in her garage that was powering a couple of space heaters. She left the door from the garage to her house open and had a fan blowing the warm air from the garage into the house.
She thought something might be wrong when she, her teenage daughter, and the family dog all began puking at the same time.
She was right.
Her carbon monoxide level was 22.
Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning are often confused with the flu and include headache, dizziness, confusion, vision changes, and vomiting. As the levels get higher, people get sleepy. Seizures can even occur. In people with bad coronary arteries, carbon monoxide can affect oxygen delivery to the heart muscle and can precipitate a heart attack.
The patient above at least had the common sense to realize it is unlikely that everyone in the house will get flu symptoms at the exact same time. That realization probably saved her life and the lives of her daughter and dog (yes, we checked to make sure the dog was safe, too).
You can’t smell carbon monoxide, but fortunately it is usually in the air with other gases that you can smell. Don’t think that you’re safe just because you can’t smell the carbon monoxide.
Interesting statistics on carbon monoxide concentrations at Wikipedia. The average baseline level of carbon monoxide in homes is 0.5 to 5 ppm (parts per million). Average level near a gas stove is 5 to 15 ppm. Average level of carbon monoxide in a chimney with a wood fire going is 5000 ppm. Average level in car exhaust is 7000 ppm. The level of carbon monoxide in undiluted cigarette smoke is …
30,000 PPM!
Calling all those smokers out there a bunch of “chimneys” is an understatement.
eMedicine.com also has some statistics about what causes carbon monoxide poisoning. Faulty home furnaces accounted for 40% of 1149 carbon monoxide poisonings. Keep your furnace well-maintained. Automobile exhaust and fires caused a combined 36% of poisonings.
Another misconception: Keeping the garage door open will keep carbon monoxide from building up in your garage if your car is running. In fact, most automobile-related carbon monoxide deaths in garages occurred with an open garage door or window! Passive ventilation isn’t enough if you leave your car running in your garage.
The immediate treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning is fresh air. Get outside. Have someone else open up the windows to ventilate the house. Oxygen displaces the carbon monoxide from the hemoglobin molecules. The more oxygen, the better. When you get to the hospital, you’ll get 100% oxygen. The higher concentrations of oxygen speed up the process of getting rid of carbon monoxide from your system. The half-life of carbon monoxide in your system (the amount of time it takes for the level to drop by 50%) is more than 5 hours in room air. The half life drops to 80 minutes when you’re breathing 100% oxygen. With hyperbaric oxygen treatment, the half life of carbon monoxide in your system is reduced to about 20 minutes.
Want to save yourself a visit to the emergency department and possibly keep yourself from waking up dead?
Every house should have a smoke detector and a carbon monoxide detector on every level. Change the batteries every time you change the clocks back and forth (all you folks in Arizona and Hawaii just play along anyway – even though you probably don’t have furnaces and don’t change the clocks).
Oh, and stop smoking! (Right Happy?)
Right you are, doc. Those are some impressive stats you posted.
By the way, I have to be the first to ask.
Do you allow coitus and a post coitus cigarette in your call room?
Hey –
What kind of show do you think I’m running here?
What do you think this is … my hospital?
With Harold?
Or Dick?
OH MY GOD.
I still can’t believe what some-dude (or dudette) considers to be normal behavior. Is common sense really that rare?
And thanks for the stats. I know enough about Carbon Monoxide poisoning that it is nothing to mess with.
CO monitors all through my house.
“Want to save yourself a visit to the emergency department and possibly keep yourself from waking up dead?”
I can’t believe no one else posted this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNuFl-Uu1go
I play a little game with my ABGs at work. I look at the COHb and try to guess how many packs a day the patient smokes.
My favorites, though, are the people who tell me they’re quitting (I dun’ smoke no more!) but who somehow have CO levels in the double digits.
Get thee to a hyperbaric chamber, code 3.
Portland, Oregon, Dec. 10 fifteen years ago, a lady made the news for getting gassed at home. Six different docs in series had misdiagnosed the CO poisoning, given her pills and sent her home. A furnace guy w/ meters figured out that leaky ducts combined with furnace fan had DEpressurized the house and pulled air DOWN the chimney and blended and delivered this toxin into the living spaces.
Several problems: 1)zero for six is shameful; 2) I wrote a bill and Kate Brown, President of the Senate, introduced it, to require a health and safety check in the name of full disclosure at real estate transactions that would have yielded the healthiest housing stock in the nation because it called for an off-the-shelf Department of Energy standard test known as the worst case depressurization test to be done at real estate transfer just to eliminate the possibility of this sick house getting anybody. It takes about ten minutes to accurately perform this reliable test performed thousands of times each week on all homes weatherized under DOE standards across the US. Real estate lobbyists and gas company lined up against it. And then the killer! Real estate inspectors association wrote and PASSED a statute holding them harmless for any INVISIBLE toxin such as CO, radon, friable asbestos, etc. Poof! So a buyer pays to be told the house is fine; they move in, turn it on and it kills them and it’s LEGAL! 3) when patients show CO poisoning, is there a process to follow-up diagnosis of poisoning to trace the source BEFORE the patients are returned to their normal environment? I don’t think so, and I wonder whether this is just about as short-sighted (self-blinding) as believing an oxymeter that says O2 is 98% on a patient puking, complaining of throbbing headache and suffering from carboxyhemoglobin level of 35. Not following up is just as deadly as not looking.