For Six Weeks I Thought I Was Going Out Of My Mind. Turns Out My Own Apartment Was Slowly Poisoning Me.

It Started With The Small Things

I want to say up front that I am not a dramatic person. I am a 44-year-old accounts manager who has been in the same job for eleven years and the same apartment for four. I do not go looking for problems.

It started in late October. A headache when I woke up that cleared by about eleven in the morning. I put it down to the mattress.

Then it was the tiredness. Not ordinary tiredness — the kind where you sit down on the edge of the bed to put a sock on and lose thirty seconds. I started setting two alarms. Then three.

By the middle of November I was forgetting words mid-sentence. On a call with a client I could not retrieve the word "invoice." I sat there with my mouth open. I had to say "the thing we send you at the end of the month."

I hung up and cried at my own kitchen table.

I Became Convinced Something Was Seriously Wrong With Me

You know exactly where your mind goes. Mine went there.

Early-onset dementia. A tumour. Something with a name I would have to learn how to say out loud to my sister.

I started keeping a note on my phone of every symptom, because I no longer trusted myself to remember them accurately by the time I got to an appointment. Headaches. Nausea, mostly in the mornings. Dizziness standing up. Ringing in my ears. A flat, grey feeling that was not quite depression because it lifted, reliably, whenever I was out of the house for a full day.

That last one was in my notes for five weeks before I understood what I had written down.

My Doctor Couldn't Explain It. Neither Could The $600 Of Specialists.

Bloods came back clean. Thyroid clean. Iron fine. B12 fine.

My doctor was kind about it and said what doctors say, which is that a lot of this is stress and sleep and that we would keep an eye on it.

So I paid out of pocket. Six hundred dollars across two specialist appointments and a scan I did not need. The neurologist was thorough and found nothing, which cost me another two nights of sleep, because when the tests keep coming back clean you stop believing the problem is in your body and start believing it is in your mind.

I was, by early December, genuinely afraid I was losing myself.

What Finally Cracked It Wasn't A Doctor

It was my sister, on the phone, half-listening while she made dinner.

I was telling her that I had felt completely normal the entire four days I stayed at her place over the holiday weekend and then felt awful again by the Tuesday.

She said, "Sandra. Every single time you feel fine, you're not in your apartment."

I said something dismissive. And then I sat down.

Because she was right, and I had written it down myself, five weeks earlier, and read past it every time.

A Licensed Technician Came The Next Morning

I called a heating contractor at seven in the morning and said I thought something might be wrong with my furnace and I did not really know how to explain why.

He came at nine. He was in the utility cupboard for about six minutes. Then he came out holding a meter and asked me — and I will never forget the flatness of it — "How long have you been sleeping in that room?"

The reading in my hallway was 41 PPM.

In my bedroom, with the door shut the way I sleep, it was 52 PPM.

The furnace flue had a separation at a joint behind the panel. Not a dramatic failure. A gap you could fit a pencil into. It had been venting exhaust back into my apartment every time the heating cycled — which, from late October, was most of the night, every night.

Six weeks. I had been breathing it for six weeks.

The Alarm Wasn't Broken. It Was Built To Stay Silent.

Here is the part that still makes me angry.

There was a carbon monoxide alarm on the wall eleven feet from my bedroom door. I bought it myself. I tested it. It had a green light on it the entire six weeks.

I pointed at it and asked him why it had never gone off.

He looked at it and said, "That's doing what it's supposed to do. It's just not supposed to do what you think."

Then he explained UL 2034 to me on my own kitchen floor.

Every standard carbon monoxide alarm sold in North America is built to that standard. And the standard does not tell the alarm when to warn you. It tells the alarm how long it is permitted to stay silent.

Look at the first row and then look at my bedroom.

52 PPM. Every night, for six weeks, with the door closed.

My alarm was not faulty. It was not out of battery. It was not installed wrong. At 52 PPM it was under no obligation whatsoever to make a sound — and had it climbed to 70, it would still have been entitled to say nothing for another four hours.

It was obeying the rules. The rules are the problem.

He told me something else that I have repeated to everyone I know since. That standard was not written to protect people from carbon monoxide. It was written to stop alarms from going off so often that people take them down. It is a nuisance-prevention standard wearing a safety standard's coat.

And those are only the ones anybody counts. The six weeks I spent at 52 PPM does not appear in a single statistic anywhere. It was recorded as clean bloodwork and an unremarkable scan.

What The Technician Fits In His Own Home

Before he left I asked him what he had on his own wall.

He said nobody in his trade relies on a $15 alarm, for one simple reason: a light cannot tell you a number. Silence from a standard alarm is not the same as a clean house. It only means the level has not yet reached the point that alarm was built to care about — and that point is set far, far higher than the point where it starts doing damage to you.

What he uses has a screen on it. A live reading. He said, "I want to see the number. I don't want to be told everything's fine by something that's incapable of telling me anything else."

That sentence is why I went looking, and it is how I found Fortiva®.

That Night I Threw The Old One In The Bin

I ordered a 4-pack. Hallway, bedroom, living room, utility cupboard.

They plug into a wall outlet. No ladder, no drill, no screws into a rental ceiling. About thirty seconds each.

Every one of them came up the same: 000 PPM CO. 0% gas.

I sat on the floor of my own hallway and looked at a screen that said zero and I understood, for the first time in six weeks, that the number had not been zero before. The old alarm had never once told me that. It could not have. It had exactly one thing to say and it said it whether I was standing in clean air or in 52 PPM.

The headaches stopped in about four days. The word-finding took closer to three weeks. I still get a small jolt of something when I walk past that utility cupboard.

And I Got Off Lightly

I say that deliberately, because I did.

I live alone. There was no child in the next room. There was nobody who could not have got themselves out. The flue separated in October rather than in January when the furnace would have been running twice as hard. And my sister happened to say the right sentence at the right moment while she was making dinner.

Take any one of those away and this is a different article, written by somebody else, about me.

The thing I want people to take from this is not that carbon monoxide is dangerous. Everybody knows that. It is that doing the responsible thing is not the same as being protected. I bought the alarm. I tested the alarm. I did what you are told to do. And it sat eleven feet from my head for six weeks, working perfectly, legally silent.

Why Fortiva Is Different

• Live digital readout — the actual number, updated continuously
• Reacts at low levels a standard alarm is required to ignore
• Four sensors in one — CO, natural gas/propane, temperature, humidity
• Plugs into any standard wall outlet — no ladder, no tools, 30 seconds
• Backup power so it keeps monitoring through an outage

Carbon monoxide does not spread evenly through a home. That is exactly why my hallway read 41 and my bedroom read 52. One unit in one hallway protects one hallway.

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Two Futures

In the first one, nothing is wrong. The screen reads zero tomorrow and it reads zero in ten years, and you spent about a hundred dollars to know that instead of assume it.

In the second one, something is already venting into a room you sleep in, and the green light on your wall is under no legal obligation to mention it for another four hours.

I spent six weeks in the second one thinking I was losing my mind.