Protect yourself against a killer

Remodeling their home almost killed Flor Galindo and her family. Debris and dust from their work plugged the filters on their furnace, allowing a buildup of carbon monoxide. They had a carbon monoxide detector but had unplugged it because it was in the way of their work. [But if they had a battery operated portable CO detector, it wuld have been with them all the time and they could have been alerted much sooner than after they began to see ill effects on their health. Try www.transducertech.com Pocket CO]

Generators are the usual suspect when people talk about the danger of carbon monoxide, but remodeling, a ventless fireplace, an old stove or warming up a car also can increase carbon monoxide to dangerous levels.

Galindo, a 33-year-old from Ulysses, says she and her husband, Pedro, woke up with headaches one morning in October 2005. They didn't think much of it as Pedro left for work.

"All of a sudden, my youngest, my 4-year-old, just started screaming," Galindo says. She ran into Aaron's room, saw his eyes rolling back and rushed him to the hospital, where doctors said he had carbon monoxide poisoning. She rushed back home to get her daughter, Andrea, and called her husband. "We all had carbon monoxide poisoning," she says.

By chance, their oldest son, Carlos, had spent the night with his grandparents. His bedroom is in the basement, "so he would have gotten it worse," because he was closer to the furnace. "We're very blessed that he wasn't there," Galindo says.

Firefighters who checked the house found the furnace filters completely plugged and estimated that the carbon monoxide had been building up since 2 or 3 a.m. "If it had happened earlier, we probably wouldn't be here," Galindo says.

Galindo, her husband and the two youngest children were flown to Wichita to be treated in a hyperbaric chamber at Wesley Medical Center. The treatment speeds the removal of carbon monoxide from the blood.

The family seems fine, and the children have shown no lasting effects. The Galindos are taking no chances: The carbon monoxide detector was plugged in immediately, and they added additional ones near sleeping areas. They also test them regularly.

"We were blessed in that it wasn't anything bigger," Galindo says.