Killer in My Home

 Most people take for granted that the air in their home is relatively clean and safe. I learned a difficult lesson this winter when I found out that this is not always the case.

In September, my beloved dog Chewie – a black and tan, 10 pound Chihuahua – got sick. Very sick. In my mind, it was completely unexpected because a few months earlier a vet had given him a clean bill of health. Now his new vet wasn't sure 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, loss of bladder control, 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 this nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right, but I gave him the medicine his 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 with my first child and feeling very ill myself. But I woke up 4 or 5 times every night to respond to his cries and 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. So I did.

Several weeks later, in January, my second oldest Chihuahua  – Ernie – got sick and exhibited the exact same symptoms as Chewie, everything but the seizures.

The vet said Ernie also had a brain tumor. A brain tumor? How could two totally 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.

That is when I noticed that his dizziness increased after he would lay down in front of the heat vent on the living room floor to stay warm. Just like Chewie did.

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

"It couldn't be," my husband said, pointing to our top-of-the-line carbon monoxide detectors. 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 Ernie couldn't get close to it. And within a week, all of his symptoms were gone.

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.

The sonogram technician began asking me a series of questions. Did I smoke? Was I around people who smoked? I started to get nervous because I don't smoke.

The technician gestured to the small screen of the sonogram machine and pointed to what he called Blood Pools in my placenta. At 26 weeks, he said, my placenta looked as if I were at the end of my pregnancy. He attributed the damage to exposure to low levels of carbon monoxide, just like he'd seen in women who smoked while pregnant.

Carbon monoxide? But didn't our carbon monoxide detectors in our house read ZERO?

A few days later, I called a furnace company. The furnace guy spent about fifteen minutes checking the house for carbon monoxide with a hand held detector. 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. Then he went to check the Peak Levels on our detectors.

Peak Levels? The furnace guy showed me how to press the Peak Level button on the face of the detector to see what levels it had registered in the past that weren't high enough to set off the detector alarms.

When he pressed the Peak Level buttons, we saw that both detectors had picked up low levels of carbon monoxide at some point over the winter. The levels were not enough to kill my husband or me, but they were definitely enough to kill a small pet such as a bird or a Chihuahua. Enough to damage my placenta and possibly affect my unborn child. Enough to kill a newborn infant.

So we owned some of the best detectors on the market, but the levels of carbon monoxide in our house were too low to set off the alarms. And we didn't know how to read them properly.

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

People try to comfort me by telling me that Chewie was like a canary in a coalmine – that his death was the first signal that something was wrong with the air in our home. That doesn't ease the pain of Chewie's death. But at least I know our house will be safe for a baby.