Chlorine Poisoned and pregnant, how bad is this?
- Thread starter Lizzy
- Start date
Thank you for asking your OB family member. I think comparing it to Gen. Anesthesia is a good way of looking at.
I tend to agree this may be something other than chlorine (i.e. chloroform). Exposure to chlorine usually yields other symptoms: coughing, burning eyes, irritated nasal passages, skin irritation/burns/blistering/redness, stomach or abdominal pain/vomiting.
It may be a combination of other things, but it is not uncommon for high levels of chlorine gas exposure (i.e. factory situation) to cause delirium or coma, so I can understand how you felt under-the-weather and tired though this could have also been a little virus or something you ate, too. Facts are you will really never know for sure. The good news is you got out of the pool and will not go back in until you are sure it is safe.
I hope you took an immediate fresh water shower.
My question is, "did your lungs hurt and/or cough?" Were you coughing or your sinuses irritated? What about your skin and sensitive parts (i.e. eyes, and other "delicate" areas)? These are the very first signs of plain chlorine over-exposure.
I would still presume you got a bigger exposure to chlorine than anything else, but you would have to know your combined chlorine to be sure if this was purely a free-chlorine exposure or worse.
Either way, I presume all will be just fine, but we will pray for you. Please write us back and let us know what your doctors say after they get the results, but do not worry too much... The human body is resilient. When pregnant, your body will do its best to try and protect the fetus, so at worse the baby probably felt it had a hang-over, too.
It may be a combination of other things, but it is not uncommon for high levels of chlorine gas exposure (i.e. factory situation) to cause delirium or coma, so I can understand how you felt under-the-weather and tired though this could have also been a little virus or something you ate, too. Facts are you will really never know for sure. The good news is you got out of the pool and will not go back in until you are sure it is safe.
I hope you took an immediate fresh water shower.
My question is, "did your lungs hurt and/or cough?" Were you coughing or your sinuses irritated? What about your skin and sensitive parts (i.e. eyes, and other "delicate" areas)? These are the very first signs of plain chlorine over-exposure.
I would still presume you got a bigger exposure to chlorine than anything else, but you would have to know your combined chlorine to be sure if this was purely a free-chlorine exposure or worse.
Either way, I presume all will be just fine, but we will pray for you. Please write us back and let us know what your doctors say after they get the results, but do not worry too much... The human body is resilient. When pregnant, your body will do its best to try and protect the fetus, so at worse the baby probably felt it had a hang-over, too.
I am glad everything seems to be turning out good, as to your question about the test kit, it is far from ideal, but with some careful measured additions of CYA it should get you through the end of the season. Just be very wary of those pool care instruction sheets that are often found in these pool test kits, the problem is most of the test kit manufacturers just reprint the same instruction sheets with the same suggestions year after year, decade after decade with no regard to improvements in understanding of water chemistry that have been discovered over the years. This simple reprinting of the same old suggestions has been going on for at least 30 years (I know I found a test kit from the early 1980's in a storage closet a while back), perhaps even longer, maybe 40 or 50+ years.
I didn't have any lung, sinus, or skin issues. It seems like if the chlorine was 375 times higher than normal that I should have had some of those symptoms, no? My 6 year old son said his eyes were burning a little, but I don't think it was bad, they weren't red. I didn't get any in my eyes. We did take fresh water showers afterwards but still had chlorine smell on our skin and our clothes were a little bleached out.
I will let you know what the results say. I can pick up a better test kit from a pool store tomorrow, but after the cover being off all day in the sun I suppose it won't tell us much about the state of the pool on Friday afternoon.
I will let you know what the results say. I can pick up a better test kit from a pool store tomorrow, but after the cover being off all day in the sun I suppose it won't tell us much about the state of the pool on Friday afternoon.
Based on the available information, I would suspect that the chlorine was very high. With the pool covered and the SWG on full, the FC level would climb very quickly. How many gallons is the pool and what SWG cell do you have?
You really need FAS-DPD to know for sure.
I would suggest staying out of the pool until you get accurate test information.
You really need FAS-DPD to know for sure.
I would suggest staying out of the pool until you get accurate test information.
That is not the test kit you need. It only tests for chlorine, Total Alkalinity (TA), and pH. The chlorine test is an OTO test which is the least accurate (the FAS-DPD test is much better). The test kits we recommend are either the TFTestkits TF-100 or the Taylor K-2006 which are compared in Test Kits Compared where the TF-100 is the better value. Not only do these test kits have the far superior FAS-DPD chlorine test, but also test for Calcium Hardness (CH) and Cyanuric Acid (CYA).
The FC level alone does not tell you the active chlorine level. As you surmised, Cyanuric Acid (CYA) would have protected you because CYA significantly moderates chlorine's strength. When CYA is present, most of the chlorine is bound to it unless the FC is much higher than the CYA level. The FC/CYA levels we recommend for SWG pools has an FC that is roughly a minimum of 5% of the CYA level is equivalent in active chlorine to a pool with only 0.04 ppm FC with no CYA. I assumed you had 15 ppm FC with no CYA so 15/0.04 = 375.
CYA isn't just needed in outdoor pools exposed to sunlight. It does not just protect chlorine from breakdown from sunlight. It hugely moderates chlorine's strength. So having even a modest FC level with no CYA is a lot stronger in active chlorine than a high FC with CYA in the water. The chlorine bound to CYA is far less active in its effects with less than 1/150th the oxidation power and even less disinfection capability. So not putting in any CYA into the pool was not good especially when the FC level got higher.
It's not your fault that you didn't know about CYA being needed and how it would protect against chlorine over-exposure. This is a chemical fact that the pool industry denies and in fact you will read in many sources how they say that CYA is not needed in indoor pools or pools not exposed to sunlight and in fact many state commercial/public pool regulations prohibit use of CYA in indoor pools (and New York State prohibits it in all commercial/public pools). The actual chemical understanding has been known since at least 1974 but the chemical manufacturers of stabilized chlorine products kept repeating the mantra, "CYA doesn't matter; only FC matters" over and over again until nearly everyone believed it including themselves since repeating a lie for over 40 years is over a generation of people where origins of truth aren't even remembered.
Your skin (the outer dead skin layer) would have been oxidized by chlorine much faster, but it may be that your skin is not as sensitive to high chlorine levels as it is to chloramine levels and the latter tend to be higher in commercial/public high bather-load pools. On the other hand, your tap water may be chloraminated (i.e. have monochloramine for residual disinfection) so if you were sensitive to chloramine you'd likely have a reaction in the shower or bath (if you tell me you city I can look up your water quality report to find out if your tap water is chlorinated or chloraminated). As for chlorine smell, it should have outgassed significantly faster so you should have noticed a fresh chlorine bleach-like smell, but commercial/public pools often have a "bad pool smell" from chloramines so perhaps you didn't think there was a problem because you didn't smell the "bad" smell. So I don't know why your skin didn't react in your pool, but there are other people who have swam in high FC with no CYA and not noticed significant effects on their skin.
Basically if you were to dilute chlorine bleach 1:6000 (about 1/8th of a teaspoon of 8.25% bleach in a gallon of water) then you can see how that affects your skin -- it may not irritate it. People use such diluted bleach cleaning solutions, and even stronger ones, but usually wear rubber gloves.
Other than whatever your doctor tells you about your exposure, I wouldn't worry about it. From your symptoms you may have had the short-term effects of chloroform exposure but that is just short-term. As others wrote, it's like being exposed to an anesthetic, but in your case not nearly enough for you to become unconscious. From chlorine, it doesn't sound like you had even short-term effects. If you had significant nose or throat irritation, then there may have been some effects in your lungs though even that would more likely be short-term since the levels for chlorine itself were not that high. Basically, it's the chlorine by-products when reacting with ammonia and organics that are generally more of concern. You may have slightly increased your cancer risk, but we're talking about risks in the 1 in a 100,000 to one million lifetime risk range getting accelerated by one year so really negligible.
It takes significantly higher chlorine levels to produce irritation of the nose and throat. In high bather-load commercial/public pools, there can be more chloramines including the very volatile and irritating nitrogen trichloride, but in your pool you wouldn't notice that unless perhaps you smelled your skin sometime after getting out of the pool (and if chlorine reacted with your skin it would be "bad pool smell" but probably not enough to be irritating). Your swimsuits fading or getting bleached out is the clearest indication of the significantly higher chlorine level. Compared to the level we recommend, every day of you using the pool at the high FC with no CYA was equivalent to about a year of such use at FC that is 5% of the CYA level. My wife used to experience this effect (though not nearly as extreme) when swimming in a commercial indoor community center pool with 1-2 ppm FC and no CYA where her swimsuits would degrade (elasticity gets shot) after every winter season while in our own pool with 3-6 ppm FC and 30-40 ppm CYA the swimsuits would last for 7 years before seeing similar effects.
Thank you very much Chem Geek. We'll get one of the recommended test kits instead. I really appreciate your help.
I never thought it was that complicated, but I am glad we have some good pool experts on here.
I think what everybody wants to know most of all is what is your Free Chlorine, Combined Chlorine, and CYA levels.
I honestly doubt your CYA levels are a at a baseline of 0 unless you have been chlorinating with pure bleach or liquid chlorine since day one. A saltwater system to boot. I would imagine at start-up the contractor would put in some CYA, but who knows.
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Does your pool pass the overnight test? I.e. If you raise the Chlorine to a reasonable level let's just say 5ppm after dark then stop ALL additions of chlorine (i.e. your Saltwater system, auto feeders, etc) does it have the same level 8 hours later (before sunlight). If not, how much do you loose?
I guess what I am saying is you may already have properly shocked the pool... who knows.
Like me, you need a testkit.
I think what everybody wants to know most of all is what is your Free Chlorine, Combined Chlorine, and CYA levels.
I honestly doubt your CYA levels are a at a baseline of 0 unless you have been chlorinating with pure bleach or liquid chlorine since day one. A saltwater system to boot. I would imagine at start-up the contractor would put in some CYA, but who knows.
****
Does your pool pass the overnight test? I.e. If you raise the Chlorine to a reasonable level let's just say 5ppm after dark then stop ALL additions of chlorine (i.e. your Saltwater system, auto feeders, etc) does it have the same level 8 hours later (before sunlight). If not, how much do you loose?
I guess what I am saying is you may already have properly shocked the pool... who knows.
Like me, you need a testkit.
The answer to this is already in this thread:
This is a small Intex pool, not an in-ground pool put in by a contractor. It did not have CYA added to it because it was going to be covered and the thought was that CYA wasn't needed because the cover would keep out sunlight. Since salt was added and a saltwater chlorine generator was used, there was no need for using Trichlor or Dichlor so there probably isn't any CYA in the pool water.
Why does this matter? This isn't a pool with any obvious problems of cloudiness or algae. And yes, at these extraordinarily high active chlorine levels there is certainly no need to SLAM the pool. Instead, the SWG needs to be turned off to lower the FC level and CYA needs to be added to the pool.
If you look at Figure 5 on page 3 in this link, a person's arm was put into a 30 liter (about 8 gallons) water tank with around 4 ppm FC (with no CYA) and in the graph the arm was put in at the 30 minute mark and immediately chloroform concentrations rose. The rate of chloroform production would be proportional to the active chlorine level. The chloroform is formed in the skin and migrates both out of the skin (where it was measured in the water in the tank) and into the blood stream so with continued immersion in highly chlorinated water the chloroform concentration would continue to rise until the rate of production equated the rate of dilution into the water (assuming a large water volume in a swimming pool). Our recommended FC/CYA levels for SWG pools are 100 times lower in active chlorine than in this experiment.
In this paper in a high bather-load public pool in Barcelona, swimmer exposure to 1.17 ppm FC (likely with no CYA) had trihalomethanes (THMs) which are mostly chloroform increase by a factor of 7 in exhaled breath immediately after swimming (that's how chloroform gets back out of the bloodstream, mostly through the breath). In this case, the correlation was higher with concentrations of chloroform in the air above the pool water, but that's more typical in high bather-load pools with significant churning of the water. In your case with fairly fresh water in your pool, I think the primary source of chloroform was reaction with your skin and not the pool water itself nor the air above it. Our recommended FC/CYA levels for SWG pools are around 30 times lower in active chlorine than the average in the pool in this study.
This recent incident in North Carolina had excessively high chlorine levels put into the water and 25 children experienced nausea and vomiting. This sounds more like direct over-exposure to chlorine at higher levels rather than a slower buildup of chloroform from high, but not extremely high, chlorine levels.
I can't seem to find sources showing pools with high chlorine levels that resulted in specific chloroform-like symptoms without also having direct chlorine-like symptoms, but I'm sure they exist since automated systems do sometimes fail and pool operators may not check as frequently as they should. Unfortunately, many of the incidents have lumped together symptoms though some have headache, dizziness and nausea without difficulty breathing, throat irritation, chest discomfort, or coughing. So some of the incidents that were identified as being caused directly by excessively high chlorine levels may in fact have been indirectly caused by chlorine and were instead caused by chloroform. In general, incidents only get reported when they appear more suddenly and especially to many people (i.e. outbreaks) so those are perhaps less likely to be from elevated chlorine levels, but not high enough to show direct chlorine effects. Table 11 in this link shows that the top reported symptoms of respiratory irritation (56.8%), gastrointestinal (17.9%; well maybe not this one), eye irritation (9.7%), and shortness of breath (6.1%) were consistent with direct chlorine effects while dizziness/central nervous system (3.6%) and headache (2.7%) may be more associated with chlorine's indirect effect of chloroform production.
Thanks for the info again! My blood work came back normal. I'm feeling fine today. My 6 year old son never really exhibited any symptoms from the same exposure, so I think my pre existing chemical sensitivity / intolerance was a big part of my reaction.
- May 23, 2015
- 24,434
- Pool Size
- 16000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
Woooohoooo!!! Super happy to hear it! Thanks for keeping us all updated.
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THANKS! for updating us!
So when is the little one due? I bet not soon enough for a momma with a 6 yr old!
Kim
So when is the little one due? I bet not soon enough for a momma with a 6 yr old!
Kim
He was due 2 days ago. Going in to get checked out this morning. Today might be the day. 
OH NO! No update so maybe we have a new child in the world for us to ohhhh and awwww over!
Kim
Kim
Whoo hoo, I've been following the thread, and I'm looking forward to finding out what the doc says about the babies ETA.
- May 23, 2015
- 24,434
- Pool Size
- 16000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
Perhaps if momma gets her new baby in the pool when it's balanced we can get to the baby before the pool stores try to brainwash the little guy/gal
Any TFP onesies printed with "This babe only swims in a Trouble Free Pool" sold on tftestkits.net??
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