Carbon Monoxide Reading

[fumedup]

Hi all,

So I just had my initial booking-in visit and was told I have a high reading of 6 when I did the breath test. We have a carbon monoxide monitor at home which says the levels are fine. I could have stopped breathing at level 3 but really pushed myself to breath out as much as possible (thinking that's the point?), one midwife said my lungs are great, the other said it shows high carbon monoxide.

Has anyone else had a high reading? She told me to get my boiler checked. I'm a bit worried now 🥴.

Do the test again. The machine may have been wrong or broken.

Did you drive to the appt? It may be that your car needs looking at. Or my midwife said often high readings are just because someone has walked along a busy road to get to the appt and its all the fumes, or driven with the windows open in traffic.

The only other thing is can be is if you live with a smoker, that can give a higher reading

I have an electric car so I can't imagine it being that. I also don't live with a smoker or smoke myself. I'm just so baffled by it. I hope it doesn't affect the baby . I've asked for someone to check the boiler but I'm sure it's ok

With my first child I had a very high reading at appointment. I'm not a smoker and do not live with a smoker. The reading was put down to me walking past busy traffic on the way to the appointment. At my next appointment I repeated the test and the reading was very low and was again a few weeks later. The only annoying thing was as I had a high reading the midwife had to inform NHS stop smoking service who kept calling me to help me quit q non existent smoking habit

Yes I did. At the time I lived in the SE and had walked along a busy road about 30 minutes prior to the appointment. Quite worrying really.

Yes, I had this during my last pregnancy! The first reading in early pregnancy was fine but the second in my last trimester was 9!! At first they thought the reader was faulty but the midwife and student midwife then got low results. Anyway they got me to check my boiler (which was fine) and come back to repeat the test with my husband a couple of days later and it was back down to really low! So they said it could have been caused by being stuck behind a very polluting vehicle or something on my journey. I still feel a bit confused about it two years later but baby was born with no issues and my reading in this pregnancy was fine so hopefully it was just a one off.

This is precisely why I declined the test. Never smoked, don't live with a smoker and we have three Nest smoke alarms in the house that all have a CO detector. If I tested and it pulled up a reading it would be because we live in the city centre and I'd cycled to the appointment - i.e. environmental and nothing I could do about it. Wasn't worth the stress or worry.

I read up on this test before my first pregnancy booking appointment and found a Tommy's (I think) information leaflet about it. They test everyone so that smokers don't feel stigmatized and obviously there is a small chance you might have a faulty gas appliance.

Just to update this, we had someone come out to check our boiler and it was all perfect. He decided to check our kitchen too to be safe. It turns out our gas cooker (which is ancient) has been leaking carbon monoxide as it's not able to have complete combustion when lighting. So we need to get that changed ASAP. This makes so much sense now and also feel terrified that we've been taking it in for months. Not sure how much longer we could have handled it. Gah so scary!

Anyhow thank you for all the replies and I hope this can help someone in future

Ciao xx

Glad you I got it sorted. Thankfully the new test picked it up, awful to think what could have happened.

Congratulations on your pregnancy