Evan Pak

Evan and Kaitlyn were hanging out in their Northfield apartment when Evan started feeling sick with nausea and chills. He took a nap, but woke up feeling worse – vomiting, racing heart, trouble breathing. Kaitlyn, a medical assistant who soon will be studying to become a physician assistant, checked Evan’s resting heart rate: 130 beats per minute, more than double his usual rate. Kaitlyn’s heart rate was up too, plus shortness of breath and a nasty headache. “We realized it was pretty serious,” Evan says. 

They went to the Emergency Department. Several tests – ECG, chest x-rays, blood tests, urine tests, nasal swabs for COVID and flu – helped the care team rule out possible causes, and home in on the culprit: carbon monoxide poisoning. 

Their blood tests showed an imbalance in their white blood cells, plus heightened levels of carboxyhemoglobin, which forms when carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in the blood and prevents blood from carrying oxygen throughout the body. “It was really high, but it tends to flush from your bloodstream pretty quickly once you start breathing fresh air,” Evan says. Plus, they both got sick within 30 minutes of each other: “It’s unlikely that any other illness would set in that quickly, that severely, and that simultaneously.”  

Evan and Kaitlyn were put on high-flow oxygen for about an hour. Once their vital signs returned to normal, they were discharged. But they weren’t sent home: “They told us not to go back to the apartment that night,” Evan says. “We went to my family’s house instead.”  

Later, the city building inspector told Evan and Kaitlyn they could go into the apartment for just 15 minutes at a time. Their carbon monoxide detector was up to Minnesota state code; the problem may have been caused by cold weather. Kaitlyn’s dad is a commercial architect, and Evan’s uncle is the head of the national 911 system. Each of them separately suggested that something on the outside of the building may have iced up, and caused exhaust to back up into the apartment. 

“It seems like an intermittent issue,” says Evan, because a few months earlier, he and Kaitlyn had similar symptoms. They went to the clinic to get tested for flu. “The wait time was long, and we started to feel so much better that we just went home.” Both times, it was a very cold day – and they turned up the heat when they started feeling sick. Of course, that made it worse.   

Evan’s advice: “Make sure you have carbon monoxide detectors that are in good working order. And trust your body if something feels wrong. If you feel sick, get checked out. It can make a big difference in the final outcome.” 

Mystery solved.