In 2007, I arrived home from work and noticed the smell of gas in the old house where I’d lived, since January. So, over the coming days, I mentioned it a few times to my landlady who lived there, too, but as it was, I later suspected the old hob which was similar in style to a vintage 1950s ‘New World 75 Gas Cooker,’ because soon enough: I began to feel unwell on a regular basis.

Yet, at the time and with misplaced faith in the hob, my health changed and radically so because prior to moving in: I’d cycled 36-miles, three times within a year. On Boxing Day of 2005, I rode the distance in six-and-a-half hours on a mountain bike carrying an 80-litre rucksack, weighing roughly 20-kilos. The weather was cold nationally with snow on the ground in much of England, too. Then, a few months later in the summer of 2006: I rode the same bike in July and did it in two-hours-one-minute, minus the weight – averaging 17.5-mph the whole way. By then, the daily temperatures were hot with the country regularly basking in the late 20s to 30s, making the journey nice but uncomfortable. In short, I was physically fit.

‘A healthy body means a healthy mind. You get your heart rate up, and you get the blood flowing through your body to your brain. Look at Albert Einstein. He rode a bicycle. He was also an early student of Jazzercise. You never saw Einstein lift his shirt, but he had a six-pack under there.’

Steve Carell

Soon, though, this fitness level began to wane, and I started losing weight as friends looked at me in strange and concerned ways. Yes, I could see in the mirror that I looked gaunt at times, but I never made the connection between the property and my degrading health. Meanwhile, a friend who owned a delicatessen insisted on trying to fatten me up, but the weight kept falling. So, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the grip of chronic carbon-monoxide poisoning and as the headaches, fatigue, dizziness and mind scramble worsened: I stayed confused as to why but more so, when the nose bleeds started.

Multiple visits to my GP who was no longer my previous excellent doctor proved fruitless, and none of this helped in my relationship, either, where I was constantly tired and which in retrospect explained why I was so worn out after bursts of energy playing football at an outdoor centre, with my girlfriend’s older brother. So, time moved on and with her family increasingly confused by my lack of energy: I finally moved out of the property, in September 2009, and spent a year staying on people’s sofas because I was struggling. Even so, as the sickness and lethargy subsided, I still didn’t know that my previous tenancy with regularly bad air had been the issue and remarkably, in August 2010: I moved back in.

‘The fatigue produced on the muscles of the human frame does not altogether depend on the actual force employed in each effort, but partly on the frequency with which it is exerted.’

Charles Babbage

So, by now, I’d changed jobs from administration to a telephone call centre and it was from here onwards, that things took a turn for the worst. One night, after finishing a shift at 9pm, I felt unusually bad and on the way home all I wanted to do was go to bed. So, after lying down, I soon felt changes in my breathing and quite strangely, eerie gargoyles kept flashing through my mind. Suddenly, I gasped and sat up, disorientated and scared. My heart thumped wildly, and in some weird kind of way: I knew that a grim clock of sorts was ticking. So, I got up and got dressed, knowing that I had to get to hospital and quickly.

Yet, in suspecting an issue with the gas cooker, I’d long since wondered why my landlady was unaffected. So, in the taxi, I reflected on the position of my room in relation to some of the old gas piping. By that I mean with the street having been turned into a public highway at the turn of the Twentieth Century, construction soon followed and nearly every room still had a decommissioned fireplace. So, the property was old, as I say, with the family owning it for over sixty-years and with my landlady born there, too. As a result, the fittings and fixtures were old, as well, and that meant the decades-old-gas-cooker was a candidate for structural fatigue and or failure. I should have given all of this a lot more attention than I did, but then things are often clearer, in retrospect.

Soon, I found myself thinking existentially while at the hospital, in December 2010: a building I was born in nearly forty-years earlier and where a doctor now called on a colleague to examine me, as well. So, of course, I felt worried as they approached me but unsurprised when they immediately asked about my accommodation. I told them about the old gas cooker, and they informed me that I had chronic carbon-monoxide poisoning and that I should leave the property quickly while warning others, to do the same. I could and couldn’t believe it because I’d lived there for a sum total of two years but in terms of treatment, they didn’t feel that my CO levels were sufficient to kill me within hours and that if I left the property promptly, fresh air would eventually rid my body of the CO molecules.

That was great news, but neither they nor I knew that it would take six, long years after 25-months of exposure. It proved serious and, in fact, my late aunt who was still a nurse at the time told me that my high level of fitness had probably saved my life. Well, I’d never taken my health for granted, at all, and for a brief period I felt resentment towards something, I didn’t know what, for being in that position. Clearly, life doesn’t work that way and you have to get on with it, so as not to be left behind. Yet, so many people take health and fitness for granted until something happens, to shake things up.

‘The older I get, the less I take for granted.’

Ray Winstone

So, within hours, I was lucky enough to be able to move out of the property and into my now ex-girlfriend’s younger brother’s house because he worked abroad, and I stayed there for a year. Meanwhile, a long journey to recover my health had begun and it, too, would teach me about life, myself and those internal power struggles.

It began with not being able to walk for ten minutes without resting for two hours and this naturally had an impact on my ability, to work. That led to me leaving not only my call-centre job but also the town to go and live elsewhere with my mother, for two years. There, I spent the first six months lying on the sofa as my body began to heal itself but as a forty-one-year-old man it was galling, to say the least. In fact, I was angry with life and with everything around me and once again, depression set in.

As I say, I’ve never smoked beyond trying cigars for a couple of days in my mid-twenties in addition to which, I’ve had a lifelong intolerance to alcohol. Yet, it took this truly daunting struggle for me to really appreciate the true meaning of health and fitness. The simplicity of walking to the shops seems just that until it proves, way more challenging. Forget cycling anywhere or engaging in activities to send your heart rate into its ‘max zone’, and that’s merely the physical side of things. Psychologically, it’s a whole other story because in the end it was an adjustment carrying greater poignancy, in having spent a lifetime keeping fit. It’s hard to overstate the impact of that.

It made me thankful for having done so, though, because as my late aunt pointed out: looking after myself may have been the difference between succumbing or not. In fact, if I had to pass on just one piece of cold advice to anyone, it would be to keep fit.

‘If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too much and not too little, we would have found the safest way to health.’

Hippocrates

So, going back to 2011, I was still at my ex-girlfriend’s brother’s house and really struggling physically. I had next to no energy and despite more trips to the GP, nothing in the way of a solution seemed close. I still had to rest for long periods after walking short distances and nose bleeds were by now, a regular occurrence. My job, in a telephone call-centre wasn’t helping, either. I mean, talking virtually non-stop for eight hours is a personal definition of hell anyway but it was seriously exhausting when energy itself, was a daily battle.

Eventually, it was all too much, and by the time walking just five minutes from the bus stop to the house became an ordeal: I knew, I was in serious trouble. I had rent and bills to pay, which only made the stress worse and in not knowing how I was going to get through this, my anxiety levels rocketed.

It was at this point that I had to go and live with my mother. I’d literally run out of energy, physically and mentally, and as I mentioned earlier: I spent the first six months resting on the sofa. That period of relief proved important, though, because it was only after this time that my energy began to return, slowly. Gradually, I was able to walk to nearby shops a couple of hundred metres away while my mother kept plying me with jar after jar of manuka honey, where my immune system seemed so compromised.

Sadly, any improvement then plateaued for a whole year and that was difficult to bear because I’d tasted change. In fact, the prospect of that being it in terms of no further movement sent me into a deeper depression, and I essentially gave up in my mind. It just became so difficult to see anything good about life and a sense of self-pity dug in again. After all, my friends were a long way away, and I couldn’t see a way out of the predicament. I couldn’t work, but I didn’t want to settle into anything, at all, that legitimised my stay. It was a tantrum, no doubt, and an epic power struggle that I was nowhere near balancing let alone winning. Yet, after those twelve months my health suddenly picked up again, and I dared to hope.

Happily, the improvement continued, and I managed to relocate again where I began to think about a future in which I could help others with their health and that’s when it hit me, to try and become a personal trainer.

As I was still unemployed at the time, I qualified for a subsidised training programme which allowed me to do a course leading to a Level-3 certificate in personal training. I was then incredibly fortunate to find employment but that back-fired quite badly, in terms of my health. In a nutshell, it was far too much, way too soon. I couldn’t train properly, and I mean in the way you’d expect to see a personal trainer, training. Still, I’d disclosed my recovery from CO poisoning on my application form while citing it as motivation for becoming a PT, in the first place.

‘I exercise about 40 minutes a day, and I’ll run one day and do circuit training the next day. I live an area where there are brilliant hills and mountains, so I get a good hill run with my dog. At home, I’ll do the circuit training with old weights, along with pull-ups in the trees that sort of stuff.’

Bear Grylls

Even so, the unravelling began with a friendly ‘Plank-off’ competition between the trainers, and I only lasted for five minutes, placing bottom of the team. The winner by the way was the oldest trainer, who at the time was fifty-two and who lasted a whopping, thirteen minutes! Equally, when a ‘fastest mile on the treadmill’ took place: I did it in six-minutes-fourteen-seconds, as a forty-two-year-old. Way faster than twenty-years earlier but again, placing last in the team.

Sadly, it was after that run that my health fell off a cliff, once more. I picked up various mild infections and a far more painful bladder one while feeling constantly short on energy, will and life. The nosebleeds continued, too, and yet, just as I began to question the sense in trying: life has an amazing way of bringing things to you. One day, as I walked around the gym talking to the members, a guy remarked on my tired appearance and joked that I’d had too many late nights. So, we started chatting, and I told him about the CO poisoning and its impact which led to him telling me that he was a gas engineer and that he’d attended a course on the subject, the previous year.

In asking about the length of my chronic exposure: he told me that the estimated recovery is roughly one-and-a-half-times, the exposure period itself. That set off a lightbulb in my head with a feeling of parting clouds and Handel’s, Hallelujah Chorus. I suddenly knew why it was taking so bloody long, to get fit again. However, I’ve been unable to verify this healing time-period, so I’d be interested to know where it came from. Nevertheless, it seemed more or less accurate in my case because the 25-months that I spent in that house translated into five years of recovery, by his measure. Six-years in real terms, which was slightly over the estimate but so what? At that point, I was just three years into healing.

So, a critical factor followed in trying to train others whilst lagging behind myself, and it showed as I overslept again, one morning, instead of turning up to train someone at 6am. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open; so, after apologising to the client and my boss, I decided to call it a day. It wasn’t working out in the way that I’d hoped, so obviously I had to accept it and quickly, rather than languish in denial all over again. Still, it wasn’t easy taking yet more failure, but I had to think clearly because I wasn’t getting any younger.

‘It’s fine to celebrate success but it’s more important to heed the lessons of failure.’

Bill Gates

Once again, my ex-girlfriend came to the rescue and I moved back into her brother’s property. It was another injection of hope where I couldn’t take an opportunity for granted and so this time, I took matters into my own hands as I sat with my laptop and medical notes. In fact, I wasted no time in researching carbon-monoxide poisoning and the long-term effects.

The topic seemed vast and complicated, so I spent days searching the internet for anything resembling a hint or a clue. Chronic poisoning seems hard to analyse, though, because the duration and levels of exposure can be fairly elusive. Acute cases, such as suicide or defective appliances usually involve massive doses that are measurable if not immediately in victims, then very soon afterwards.

Still, one day, as I stared at a pile of printouts of my blood test results going back over a decade: something, stood out. All the results showed a persistently low count of something called neutrophils which had to be meaningful in terms of a theory, at least, if not any real chemistry. So, I learnt what these were before Googling anything related to carbon-monoxide poisoning and neutrophil levels, and I found a lot of information. Yet, the data talked about increased levels of neutrophils as biomarkers of both inflammation and injury to oxygen-heavy organs like the heart or brain, in relation to CO poisoning.

I had low neutrophil levels, instead, which I now know are produced in your bone marrow but then what appeared to be a deterioration in memory began worrying me, too. I kept forgetting how to spell words or the reason for walking into a room. Okay, the latter comes with age, I know, but surely: I was too young to be losing words and as a writer, as well? I actually felt frightened by that because what if it was symptomatic of early onset dementia? Wait, hypochondria? I, don’t think so. My system had taken one hell of a hiding, and I had to keep searching.

‘My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am. I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories.’

Bjorn Borg

Well, the way in which CO binds itself to oxygen is nothing short of interesting. With an attraction to haemoglobin that’s some 230-times more powerful than oxygen, it slows the latter’s transport around the body while creating conditions similar to hypoxia. In doing so, CO binds to the Iron in haemoglobin thus restricting but not preventing the ability of oxygen to bind, too. At the same time, it increases the bond affinity between haemoglobin and existing oxygen molecules, making it harder for haemoglobin to release oxygen around the body.

This is a remarkable and cunning double-whammy whereby not only is haemoglobin’s ability to carry oxygen reduced: it’s also difficult for it to disperse any being carried. As I mentioned just now, as well, the effect of this on the body’s organs is going to be ruinous, if not fatal; so, it’s imperative to get someone in acute exposure to hospital very quickly. For people like me with chronic exposure: the need to identify symptoms and a source is also critical, particularly if there are others living in the same environment.

Once you’re permanently separated from the source, however, the more oxygen you take in: the more the CO molecules are oxidised to carbon dioxide, instead. By definition of acute exposure, though, with its high concentration levels, the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) may be necessary. Otherwise, lots of people recover from CO poisoning, by simply removing themselves from the source.

My chronic exposure lasted a little over two years, and a letter from my GP surgery at the time confirms the hospital diagnosis. Meanwhile, an NHS study cited above – defines poisoning as anything over 10% of carboxyhaemoglobin (COHb) levels, where carboxyhemoglobin is a combination of carbon monoxide and haemoglobin.

‘I always say a tremendous amount of healing is in your own hands.’

Hayley Mills

So, gradual healing and a very long search for answers continued while living at my ex’s brother’s house and in paying nominal rent, for the type of property it was. I was lucky, but all I wanted in earnest was a return to an earlier state of health and fitness before my exposure. In light of this, I kept on with the research, and one day while thinking about my low neutrophil count which from what I’d read hadn’t been a direct result of CO poisoning: I learned that neutrophils are linked to Vitamin-D.

Suddenly, I typed: ‘CO poisoning and Vitamin-D’ into Google, and my face lit up. There were studies on the impact of poisoning and Vitamin-D levels, showing correlations. So, the more I read, the more excited I grew at the reality of a pathway, after all. CO poisoning has a direct and negative impact on Vitamin-D production, which in turn impacts the creation of neutrophils.

So, that afternoon: I went straight into town and bought two small bottles of Vitamin-D3 and stared at them with the hope of a small nation. Inevitably, nothing happened for a while but then I woke up one morning a few weeks later, feeling a level of energy I hadn’t experienced in years. Mind you, let me clear: I know it could have been a coincidence where my body had simply reached the point of recovery. Also, there’s the placebo effect to think about in that maybe the psychological will to improve on the back of seeing a connection between CO and Vitamin D, changed things. Or, it could have been the genuine impact of taking the labelled doseage, on a daily basis. Regardless, I almost cried because by now it was 2015, and I’d grown tired of the ignorant accusations of laziness and hypochondria. I wanted nothing more than to be fighting fit again, so as to push my life forward.

‘We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline and effort.’

Jesse Owens

So, each day brought with it either some progress or a tiny plateau but soon I was winning the power struggle and no more so than in being able to exercise, which made me so happy. It had been a long and tough journey both physically and psychologically but amongst many things, it reinforced the lessons that life had already taught me. For instance, most people know it in one way or another but not giving up is the only option we have left when the cards fall, in particular ways.

The ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius, apparently said: ‘It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop’, which seems like sound advice. At various times in my life, which has been as eventful as anyone else’s: I knew that if I did, in fact, stop, I may never have restarted. So, at times, the only option was to stagger around aimlessly in trying this or that, just to keep the momentum going. The fact that it was mostly a false economy and thus a wasted one, too, seemed like a lesser of evils.

I met up with my former landlady in a pub a few years later, and she cried as she expressed sincere regret over what had happened. The gas cooker had since been disconnected by an engineer and, of course, she hadn’t meant to cause me any problems. Sometimes, there’s a bigger context to life and the fact that she’d helped me out with a room to rent just when I needed it, counted for something.

The fact is: life doesn’t keep score.

It doesn’t register any of your pain or suffering in determining your dues because there are none. What comes to you, comes to you and that’s all there is to it. Yet, how you deal with what comes to you defines your character and life story, but you know that already and it’s especially true of your physical and mental health.

Copyright © 2023 | recoveryourwellbeing.com | All Rights Reserved

Images:

Gas Stove, by Maklay, Pixabay – Main Image
Side Plank, by 823sl, Pexels
Frying Pan, by Gary Barnes, Pexels
Utter Despair, by Andrew, Pexels
Feeling Terrible, by Danil Yuk, Pexels
Treadmill Guy, by Will Picture This, Pexels
Noxious Fumes, by Fatih Aras Gulec, Pexels
Healthy Research, by Retha Ferguson, Pexels

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