Thanks Anthony!
I think many here are spreading the message as well as I could. The biggest thing I learned with my incident was how much the cognitive decline was with CO poisoning. At times I didn't have any symptoms yet my mental acuity was lacking. My wife would say that's me everyday. But nowhere was the cognitive decline taught to me. The other symptoms were taught as what happens, and it's what I taught when I instructed a primary student. This lead me to believe that I would be able to catch CO poisoning while it was happening. That clearly didn't work for me.
As many have stated, CO poisoning is basically hypoxia. I don't know of any studies that just examine the effect of the CO. But CO finds a way in by replacing the O2 in the hemoglobin, thus making you hypoxic.
The last flight on the day of my accident, I was able to copy and read back my IFR clearance, taxi out, and take off. It only took 4-1/2min from departure until I was sound asleep. So it can get dangerous fast, this is of course without a CO detector. With a detector I probably would have fixed my leak weeks or months before.
I'm not taking anymore chances with CO now. I'm currently redoing my panel and will have my Guardian panel mounted detector, an Aithre panel mounted detector, and a Sensorcon AV8 mounted on the panel. As well as the Lightspeed Delta Zulu headset for both front seats. That's obviously way overkill. But these are the companies that have helped me promote CO awareness in aviation and I believe in their products. It's nice to support them.
@Rick Junkin pointed this out. Many people have reported back to me what they have found with their detectors. Many find problems that could have turned much worse well before CO would have been a problem for the pilot. Broken engine mounts, V-bands, leaking exhaust burning through a fuel line, etc... So it's great to treat the CO monitor as if it is another metric on a engine monitor.
Cheers,
Dan