poisoning

Apologies, I feel I need to get this off my chest with what I have had to go through this week. It may be long so don’t feel obliged to read it all I just need to get everything off my chest.

On Saturday night our carbon monoxide alarm went off. We didn’t even know what it was, so we were looking all around the house for the alarm. Realising it was the carbon monoxide alarm we immediately opened all the windows and went to sit in the car, panicking about what would happen next. We searched up the alarm sound to see what the alarm meant. It wasn’t sounding continuously, just beeping every 30 seconds or so. On numerous websites it told us that it was most likely the batteries running out, which was strange considering it had only been installed in the last week. We went back into the house and just left all the windows open all night, are in mind it was snowing, it was absolutely freezing but we were worried about our safety.

The next say (Sunday) it went off again so this time we called the fire service who checked it was safe for us to go back in and turned off all our gas with the help of a gas safety engineer. We contacted our landlords to try and get some emergency heating or someone out to inspect it was safe. We could not contact them, they had no emergency number. So we wrapped up warm and sat through it, the temperature well below freezing with only blankets and layers to try to keep warm.

The following day (Monday) our landlords informed us they would be unable to provide an engineer that same day and that they were possibly going to be able to get someone out for the following day but there was no guarantees. With my husband working permanently from home, we needed a solution more urgently, so we provided our own engineer. But the advise before we could provide it from our landlords was to just turn our gas back on because it would “probably be fine”. The engineer found a hole in our boiler and a tree blocking the exhaust. We were being poisoned by our boiler and our landlords appeared not to care.

I have been ill since I moved in. We have slowly been poisoned since we moved in. Our engineer confirmed that since the boiler was fitted it had been slowly emitting low levels of carbon monoxide. We have lived there since February. I was really ill in September and I had no idea why. I had chronic fatigue (I was literally awake a maximum of 5 hours in a day for over a week), nausea, headaches, aching limbs, dizziness, and after numerous tests no one could say why. I know now that it was carbon monoxide poisoning. I could have died.

After a stressful trip to A&E, a separate company fixing our boiler and cutting down our tree, and a huge amount of fear for our safety, this week has been incredibly stressful. And not only that, nobody appears to be taking us seriously, we could have died. This was such a close call. We are still on edge in our home. This week has been pure hell.

Thank you for giving me the space to get this off my chest.