Poorly parrot helped save family’s lives

A FIFE FAMILY told yesterday of how their pet parrot saved their lives as their home filled with deadly carbon monoxide fumes.

Already groggy from the gas, it was only when they noticed 10-year-old cockatoo Georgie had been sick that they realised something was seriously wrong.

The family of three from Dalgety Bay, who have asked not to be named, called the emergency services and collapsed just as the ambulance arrived.

Another few minutes and they would almost certainly all have been dead.

They had such a close brush with death they have urged everyone to make sure their home is fitted with a carbon monoxide detector.

The drama began on Saturday morning when the family woke up feeling unwell. Not realising there was anything seriously wrong they went back to bed to try to sleep it off.

The husband told The Courier, “I woke up with a really bad headache and so did my wife and daughter. We went back to bed for a couple of hours.”

Later that morning he got up and as he pottered about in the kitchen his wife stayed in bed. She noticed the parrot, who has a perch in their bedroom, had been sick.

“I thought he might have choked on a pecan nut, so I made sure he’d brought everything up,” she said. The next minute she began to shake.

When her husband came back in to the bedroom he began to realise something was seriously wrong.

He shouted to their daughter, who was in her bedroom. “She never appeared,” he said. “She just told me, ‘I can’t move.’

“I looked at the parrot and he had his beak open, as if he was gasping for air and he’s never ill.

“That’s when I thought, ‘I’m ill, my wife’s ill and my daughter’s ill: it must be gas.’

“By this time I had a really bad headache and my chest was sore, so I grabbed the phone and called the ambulance. I thought I was having a heart attack.”

He was told to put his wife, who had passed out by that time, into the recovery position.

“It was difficult to think straight, but I managed to open the bedroom window and went to open the back door,” he said.

“By this time my head’s like it’s coming off and the pain in my chest was really bad. It was like walking on cotton wool...I couldn’t feel my feet on the floor.”

The ambulance arrived and, just as he let one of the paramedics in, he collapsed in a heap in the hall.

Their daughter, who is a nurse, was on the point of collapse and was trying to crawl out of her room. She had realised something was seriously wrong and sent a text message to her sister asking for help.

Her sister thought it was a joke at first, but jumped in her car and drove to the family home from Edinburgh. When she arrived she saw the ambulance and fire engines outside her parents’ house and immediately feared the worst.

Her parents and sister were carried out of the house and put in the ambulance.

The level of carbon monoxide in the house was so bad that within minutes of the emergency services arriving and going into the house the crew had begun to complain of feeling dizzy as well.

The family were rushed to Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline where they were detained overnight for observation.

They were given oxygen, and samples were taken at regular intervals to check on the level of carbon monoxide in their blood.

Eventually they were allowed home and re-united with Georgie. All three are convinced they owe their lives to the cockatoo.

“If it hadn’t been for him sitting there with his beak open we’d all be dead,” the man said. “It’s amazing, we all owe our lives to a bird.”

They are still trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Their heating engineer has been round to check their boiler and can’t find anything wrong with it.

The device is only 10 years old and gets serviced each year.

One theory is that Saturday morning’s unusually high winds may have caused the fumes to blow back into the house.

The one thing they do know is they’ll be getting a carbon monoxide detector fitted as soon as possible, and have urged others to do likewise. [Pocket CO from www.transducertech.com or www.quantumfields.com]

“I didn’t even know such things existed,” the woman said. “If I’d known, I would have had one installed.

“I think everybody should have one of these things.

“Carbon monoxide is odourless and tasteless and your life could be over before you know about it. If we’d been asleep we would have been dead.”

Her husband added, “You hear about things like this, but you never think it will happen to you, but we found out the hard way it can.”