[senco-forum] 'CO' (Carbon Monoxide) poisoning

Oops! I hit the 'send' button a little prematurely before I'd finished
editing my previous post. Hence the title of this contribution still
retained the phrase 'CO [carbon monoxide] poisoning'. Below you'll
find what I'd written on this topic before I realised this might best
be reserved for a separate post.

However before going into this I should mentioned I've been a lurker
of late and made few contributions to this list during the past year.
But long-time members of the SENCo forum will of course recall I'm an
adult education worker diagnosed with principally Tourette Syndrome
and Adult ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) plus several
other less significant neurological conditions. Furthermore I was
first diagnosed with the first of these disorders only ten years ago,
despite the fact I'm in now my early 50s and have been coping with
these and other less significant neurological issues since my early
childhood. Fortunately for me most of these conditions manifest at a
low level and on an individually basis each cause me few problems.
However when all of these are combined together they represent a major
disability, all be it one that's not immediately obvious to anyone who
meets me for the first time.

Now before giving you an update on what I've learned about these
conditions over the past year or so, let me say you are welcome to
contact me for the purpose of better supporting students coping with
TS (Tourette Syndrome), ADHD, Dyspraxia, Dystonia (Writers Cramp),
Dyslexia, Prosopagnosia (face blindness -- I have great difficulty
memorising and later recalling people's faces), and various other
neurobehavioral issues.

By way of an update I recently found out while my mother was pregnant
and subsequently during the first few years of my infancy I was daily
subject to low-level chronic Carbon Monoxide poisoning. Now this fact
is significant because it helps explain the diversity of neurological
issues I've had to contend with throughout my life.

Now until recently it was assumed the principal consequence of CO
(Carbon Monoxide) poisoning was 'anoxia', whereby oxygen circulating
in the blood is replaced by CO thus depriving body tissues of
life-giving oxygen. However it was noticed that brain-damage cause by
the inhalation of CO often didn't manifest until some time after blood
gas concentrations had been restored to normal. Upon further
investigation research discovered the body's response to CO goes way
beyond simple deprivation of oxygen. Indeed CO also has the effect of
interfering with or destroying the insulating myelin sheath that
surrounds our nerves. In summary CO can cause lasting brain and nerve
damage way beyond the effects of anoxia alone.

You may recall the recent tragic circumstances of a holidaying British
couple whose children died the result of CO poisoning from a faulty
boiler in their apartment. The parents survived and I seem to recall
they were eventually discharged from hospital. Well from what I have
researched I can report their long-term prospects are pretty grim as
the neurological damage caused by CO poisoning usually manifests some
time after the symptoms of anoxia have completely disappeared.
Furthermore CO is an especially insidious neurological poison in that
it is all-pervasive and affects all neurological tissue within the
body to a broadly similar degree. Now the brain is renown for it's
extreme plasticity in that it's capable of re-wiring itself for the
purpose of working around the consequences of major brain traumas, for
example resulting from a severe car accident. It's therefore not
uncommon for individuals completely lost their ability to speak to
relearn this skill from scratch to an acceptable degree during
adulthood. This appears to be achieved through co-opting adjacent
areas of surviving brain tissue whose function is less significant.
Hover when an individual has been affected by CO poisoning all brain
tissue is affected more or less equally which has the primary affect
of reducing the brains plasticity in response to trauma. This means
their loss of brain function that likely became apparent after their
story was no longer newsworthy is very likely to be permanent.

Well as you know in modern Britain CO poisoning is now a lot less
common. However given whole schools are often fitted with a large
single source of heating rather than small individual boilers serving
just a few classrooms, if where you teach is located physically close
to one of these installations and especially one of their waste-gas
flues then you are well advised to equip yourself with a low-cost CO
alarm or at the very least a paper based chemical CO detection strip
that changes colour in the presence of this killer gas that are
readily available for purchase form Woolworths and many other retail
outlets. Why is this so important? Because by the time you discover
you have been affected by CO poisoning it's probably too late to do
anything about this and the symptoms you experience are not likely to
improve to any significant degree.

Let me conclude with a comment made by one the world's leading CO
poisoning experts. In his opinion given a choice between CO poisoning,
a brain hemorrhage (or stroke) or major head trauma the result of a
car accident, the one he'd least want to experience is CO poisoning.
For despite the fact CO poisoning is probably the least unpleasant
experience whilst this is happening to you -- CO is a gas that is both
odourless, colourless but can be fatal in concentration in of less
than one percent of the air one is breathing in. The reasons he gives
for this because his chances of significant improvement following this
poisoning are so slim.

As for myself, what I learned only recently was that before I was born
my parents used to live in terraced mews cottage conversion that had
originally been built as a stable complex. The stalls downstairs were
rented out as garages for motor cars whereas they resided above this
in what was originally the grooms quarters. Unfortunately the man who
rented the garage downstairs was in the habit of starting his car each
morning and then leaving the engine warm up on tick-over inside the
garage before the took his car out on the road. Not surprisingly once
a day my parents' home was filled with noxious traffic fumes that
contained a significant proportion of CO. Now of course in those days
more than 50 years ago the concept of environmental pollution hadn't
been invented, so my parents were not only unaware of the dangers
there was also very little they could have done to prevent this.

In one the fact I was still an infant at that time was both lucky and
unlucky. On the negative side children and especially infants have a
far higher rate of metabolism than adults and are therefore
significantly more susceptible to CO poisoning. This helps explain why
the children of holidaying couple lost their lives the result of CO
poisoning whereas the adults survived. On the positive side this
happened at a young age when my brain was still rapidly growing before
the point where one's neuron count reaches a peak. Hence I was able to
regain some brain plasticity before reaching the stage of childhood
brain development where a major cull of surplus undifferentiated brain
cells occurs. As for my parents well because they were adults they
seem to have been less affected than me. However it's significant that
my father who was a medical student at the time had great difficulty
passing his final exams before qualifying as a GP. Indeed it seems
likely the low-level CO poisoning he suffered very likely affected his
ability to store and later recall the vast quantities of factual
information student doctors are required to memorise.