Olympic skier Bode Miller’s wife Morgan Beck Miller revealed Friday that three of their children were hospitalized two weeks ago for carbon monoxide poisoning.
The former pro beach volleyball player and model shared a video of three of her little ones wearing oxygen masks in the emergency room, writing that they had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a crane parked in their home’s driveway.
“Receiving a lot of messages so addressing it here,” she captioned the video, which showed her twin 3-year-old sons and 19-month-old daughter receiving medical care. Parents Morgan and Bode, a 2010 gold medalist at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, were attentive to the kids’ needs.
“Two weeks ago, we had a crane at our house to remove our broken hot tub. Asher, Aksel and Scarlet innocently stood on the front step of our house to watch the action which resulted in them getting carbon monoxide poisoning due to the lack of airflow in our driveway landing them in the ER.”
Apparently the children had to receive high-flow oxygen for more than four hours. “It was a terrifying experience but thanking my lucky stars they are okay,” she added.
She also shared the video on her Instagram Stories, writing, “Mama’s heart needs a break.”
A comment below the video asked Miller how she noticed something was wrong with her children, and the mom of eight replied, “Asher was complaining of an upset stomach and was white as a ghost. When I laid him down to look at his stomach, he started to pass out,” she wrote of the frightening ordeal.
At that point she rushed Asher to the emergency room, where they ran “all the tests,” which apparently came back normal.
“I wrote the nanny to check on the other kids and she said Aksel was starting to have the same symptoms,” she wrote. “I notified the nurse and she said if there’s ever more than one with the same symptoms then they check for carbon monoxide poisoning and sure enough that’s what it was. They had us clear the house and bring everyone down to get tested and they sent the fire department up to check our home.”
She told another Instagram user that they have detectors all over the inside of their house, but none of them were triggered by the carbon monoxide outdoors. The gas is colorless and odorless.
The “terrifying” emergency hits especially close to home for the Miller family, who lost daughter Emmy at 19 months old in a tragic drowning incident five years ago.
At the end of May, Miller opened up about the pain of losing a child, sharing a photo of Scarlet swimming underwater on Instagram with the caption, “Watching Scarlet swim today made me realize it’s been months where I have been running from the debilitating pain of losing a child…that gut punch that makes it hard to breathe. I’ve gone dark. I’ve refused to cry. I’ve just wanted to be numb.
“Those grief waves hit where normally I would embrace the pain and grieve, but instead… I turn my back, choke back my tears and decide to do it another day,” she continued. “It hurts too much. The profound cellular sadness feels too heavy… But watching her swim today also made me realize that this numbness doesn’t protect me from feeling the pain, it prevents me from feeling the joy…and without joy, what’s the point?”
“So after many dark months, here’s to a scary leap of living fully, openly, and vulnerably and embracing the depths of the fundamental human experience of love and loss.”