A 10-year-old girl “saved” her grandmother from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning after attending a workshop at school and giving her an alarm which detected a potentially fatal leak. Connie Burslem, now 11, who lives in Monton, near Manchester, attended a Crucial Crew workshop with St Mary’s RC Primary School in Eccles in March, where she learned about police, transport, antisocial and illegal behaviour, as well as carbon monoxide.
The class was given a carbon monoxide alarm to take away, but since Connie already had two in her home, she gave it to her 79-year-old grandmother Pauline, who lives in Cadishead. Two days later, the new alarm went off, with Pauline initially thinking it was faulty, but after calling gas distribution company Cadent, which sent an operative to make an inspection, it was discovered there was a CO leak coming from her cooker.
Pauline had been experiencing headaches and “dizzy spells” in recent weeks and even visited her GP who could not give her a conclusive diagnosis, but she did not think her symptoms were related to a CO leak. After the removal of the condemned cooker, Pauline started feeling better almost immediately, and the pair now want to highlight the potential dangers of CO leaks because, without the alarm, Pauline said she might not be here today.
“If she hadn’t gone to the Crucial Crew workshop, and she hadn’t got the alarm and she hadn’t given it to me, then who knows?” Pauline told PA Real Life. I’m out on a limb here… and nobody has any need to come here.
“If I hadn’t had the alarm, the Cadent man said to me, ‘You’d have probably become more sleepy and you could have easily just gone to sleep’. I thought, if that was a Friday night, nobody would know or think about it until Monday, and then you’d be dead. She literally did save my life.”
According to Cadent, each year there are around 40 deaths in England and Wales from CO poisoning. CO is a poisonous gas that poses a serious threat to health if exposure occurs, and it cannot be detected by smell, taste or sight.
Early this year, Pauline said she started to experience “dizzy spells”, almost causing her to fall over, along with headaches and fatigue, but she could not determine the cause. “One day, when I went to pick Connie up from school, I was walking along the pavement and I was veering right into the wall and I could not stop myself,” Pauline explained.
“I thought, ‘What is going on?’”
Pauline visited her GP, who completed tests but “couldn’t find anything wrong” – and after calling the local hospital, doctors suggested it could be related to Pauline’s perforated eardrum, which occurred three years ago. A couple of weeks later, in March, Connie attended a safety workshop with her school and she and her classmates took home a CO alarm.
Connie said she learned a lot, but she did not think CO poisoning would “happen to anybody”, adding: “It’s more likely something you’d see in a movie.”
As Connie already had two CO alarms in her home, she gave the new one to her ‘Nanna’ Pauline – and she was “really happy with it” and put it in her kitchen. Cadent says there should be an audible CO detector in every room with a fuel-burning appliance, yet Pauline only had one in her living room before receiving the new one.
“A couple of days later, the alarm went off, and I thought, ‘What’s that?’” Pauline said. “I went in the kitchen and I realised it was very loud, and I thought, ‘I wonder if it’s faulty?’ That was my first thought because I’d only had it up two days.
“I rang the emergency helpline… and someone from Cadent came in a quarter of an hour. He went all over the house, everywhere, every room, and he said, ‘It’s your cooker, it’s actually leaking carbon monoxide’.” After putting a condemn notice on Pauline’s cooker and giving her an electric hob to use, Pauline ordered a new appliance and started to reflect on her symptoms, which she had thought might even have been dementia-related.
“It didn’t even occur to me that it could be related to carbon monoxide, and I never had any dizzy spells after that, so I knew it must have been the leak from the cooker,” she said. “I was relieved because I don’t take pills, I don’t tend to get ill… and I was beginning to wonder when I was walking into walls, ‘What on Earth is happening to me?’”
After the removal of the cooker, Pauline began feeling better and even wrote a letter to the school workshop team to express her gratitude for raising awareness of the issue. She said “the timing was perfect” with the CO alarm and she is urging everyone, particularly those who are older or live on their own, to ensure they have alarms fitted and to monitor any unusual symptoms.
She said: “You always think it happens to somebody else and you always think you’re invincible. I know they say it’s the silent killer… but people don’t tend to think about carbon monoxide. In the case of people my age, if you did get dizzy spells, don’t just presume it’s old age.”
Asked how Connie felt after “saving her Nanna’s life”, she said “heroic” and “tremendous”. She added: “Don’t expect it not to happen to you because it can.”
New data from Cadent has highlighted UK household exposures to carbon monoxide are chronically underreported, with the correct figure as much as seven times higher. Cadent has collaborated with more than 30 organisations on a new eco-system to gather data about “the silent killer” and trial new solutions. To find out more, visit: cadentgas.com.