Last Sunday, Rachel Micheaux sat in her Detroit apartment with three of her friends for a “girls day” to help her get over her breakup. They shared a bottle of tequila and smoked a hookah, a water pipe.
Over the course of 5 hours, the group smoked three “orange heads” — orange-flavored tobacco — using hookahs. For the first 2 hours, says Micheaux, the windows of the apartment and the balcony door were open. She also had the air cleaner on. Then, according to the content creator, she closed the windows and doors.
“Four and a half hours after smoking, one of my friends started complaining that he had a really, really bad headache,” Micheaux, 24, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “Obviously we smoke and drink, so we just think she’s probably just feeling the effects.”
The girls continued to hang out.
“We tell her to chill and lie down,” Micheaux continues. “But she was adamant that her head hurt a lot. She told us it wasn’t normal for her.”
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About 20 minutes later, another friend became ill, she said she had a headache, chest pain and fatigue. Soon Micheaux started to feel bad too.
She says she felt like she was going to pass out. “I felt dizzy,” she adds. “My head was already very cloudy and I couldn’t formulate a thought.”
Then, he says, a literal alarm sounded.
“It was like, ‘Alert, carbon monoxide levels are high,'” Micheaux says of the apartment’s detector. “It kept going to the point where I thought, what’s going on?”
At first she actually turned off the carbon monoxide detector. “I used to have problems with the alarm when it would just go off when nothing was going on,” she explains. “So I thought the same thing was happening.”
“I turned off both alarms. They went off right away. So we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m checking the stove. I’m trying to figure out how to tell if there’s carbon monoxide,” she says.
Friends of Rachel Micheaux are being treated for carbon monoxide poisoning.
Rachel Micheaux
“We were very confused at that point. Then my friend said, we have to call 9-1-1.”
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When firefighters arrived at Micheaux’s apartment, they checked carbon monoxide levels and found them to be dangerously high.
“They said I had carbon monoxide poisoning,” says Micheaux. – They advised us all to immediately go to the hospital for treatment.
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When the group of friends arrived at the hospital at 9:30 that night, doctors took their vital signs and gave them electrocardiograms to check for heart problems. They also measured the amount of carbon monoxide in their systems.
Micheaux says her carbon monoxide level was 17%. Serious poisoning is associated with levels above 20-25%, according to the National Institutes of Health, which states that abnormal levels are considered 3% or 4% for non-smokers and 10% for smokers.
The women were put on oxygen for 5 hours to help them breathe.
“After being on oxygen for an hour, my carbon monoxide level was still at 13, which is why we ended up being in the hospital for so long, because it took a long time to get it out of my system,” she continues.
It was almost 3 in the morning when they left the hospital.
Micheaux has since turned to TikTok to share her story and spread awareness about carbon monoxide poisoning. Her biggest tip: Everyone should have a carbon monoxide detector – in every room.
“I’m not going to lie, I felt really bad at that point,” she said. “I was scared because when you hear about carbon monoxide poisoning, you usually hear about it after it’s all said and done. It’s already too late. Someone died from it,” she says.
“So when I heard that I had carbon monoxide poisoning, I thought I was going to die. It’s not funny, it’s not funny, it’s scary when you think about it. I also felt bad because I was like, wow, I didn’t know that. My ignorance led put my friends’ lives in danger. Looking back, I felt really bad and we were all pretty scared at the time.”
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Source: HIS Education