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I had classic multiple chemical sensitivity, long term, which meant that I had developed chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, and I had massive inhalant allergies and food allergies. I had features that are very much like post-traumatic stress disorder. I had these conditions for almost exactly five years, ’cause it was in early 2005 that the chemical spill took place. And it’s at that point that things started to get very serious and not in a way that I recognized at the time as serious, but they just con weird things started to happen. The perfumes, which I just found annoying before started to make me really sick. I would lose my voice, my nose would run. I would sneeze uncontrollably, I’d have a terrible headache. And then I started having this really weird phenomenon for somebody who lectures and has to think on his feet.
My thought processes would just lock up and I’d lose track of where I was in the middle of a lecture. It wasn’t just perfumes that I, that I reacted to– it was smokes of any sorts, incense, wood smoke from wood stove, tobacco smoke, toothpaste, hair conditioner, shampoo, all the cosmetics, laundry detergents, especially dryer sheets, passing dryer, dryer events. Whenever anybody applied just about anything to their lawns, whether it was fertilizers or pesticides or herbicides or the smells of these things would, would leave a bad taste in my mouth. And I would even go so far as to try to spit them out so that I didn’t swallow them. It was just a very ugly time, and I was in pain all the time. And I started to find that I was startled really easily.
It took about six months before I encountered the phrase multiple chemical sensitivity. And when I did that and got on the, on the web and found this whole huge body of literature and blogs and websites people disputing whether it exists or not, and so on…but what I kept on finding was that the things that were affecting me were affecting lots of other people in the same way. And so I, I was pretty confident that that was the correct diagnosis. I kept on going to doctors, but they were busy, so they’d send me off to somebody else. And I was diagnosed initially as, as asthmatic and given a puffer. So I stopped doing that. Went back to the doctor and he said, told me to go away and come back next week. And when I came back, he said, yes, you have all the, the symptoms of multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome.
And he didn’t know what to do with it. I have tried a whole list of, of treatment options. And some of them helped a bit, some of them gave me help for things that I wasn’t actually seeking help for. But in the end, none of them really helped. The way the DNR system has helped for the whole five years. I didn’t go out of the house without wearing a, a respirator. That was crucial. But in my own house, I didn’t tend to to wear it, but I had to be careful if the windows were open, um, because one, one whiff and my heart would be pounding, I’d have a terrible headache. I’d lose my voice. I couldn’t control my muscles, so very early on I thought that this is a neurological thing. On one occasion, I was actually rushed in the hospital with the all the symptoms of a heart attack.
I didn’t have a heart attack. I was just having an MCS attack, that pounding heart, that arrhythmia. The feeling that if I didn’t get out of this smell usually, I would, I was just going to die. Living with severe MCS is just awful. It puts you at odds with your neighbors because every time they do their laundry, you have to close all the windows and hope that you get them closed before their laundry smells come into the house. When you want, friends can’t just drop over because you’re sick. Most of the time. I composed an elaborate document and send it to all my friends and said, these are the conditions that I require. If you come to visit me in my house, you cannot have any scent on… and so here is a list of the things that I use to wash my clothing.
Here’s a list of the things that I use in the shower. Do not put on any deodorant. Yery strict rules. Don’t, don’t smoke in your car. If you have one of those little air freshener things in your car, get rid of it because that’ll leave sense on your clothing. That will make me sick. And so I had very strict regime for people coming to visit me. I trained my friends and those who are untrainable are no longer my friends, right? . There, there comes to be a cutting point where you can’t have people like that in your house. Still accidents will happen and my friends will, would arrive and every once in a while there’ll be a residual scent on them. And they knew that they were going to be ushered into the bathroom to have a shower to get rid of it. And I don’t have to do that anymore. Fairly early on in my illness, I managed to make contact with various other people. And one of those people lead a year, several years later took the DNR training program and it worked for her. And she phoned me up all excited,
And I thought, sure, we’ll see how she does . A year later, I got in touch with her again and she was still fine. She was actually back at work and we had tea together. And so I decided, I’ve been through a whole bunch of things that didn’t work. This is not getting any better, in my view at the future was pretty bleak. And so I thought I would give it a try. I’m so glad I did.
My understanding about the nature of MCS and these related illnesses is that these are, these are real illnesses. Standard medicine makes an error when they treat these as mental illnesses and therefore delusional, unreal, and therefore
That they can’t be harmful. These are real illnesses and the things that certains scientists like, Martin, Martin, Paul, and there are various other names, I can’t escape me right now. They’ve got bits of them. They’ve got bits of the symptoms. They’ve got bits of the the cascade of effects that come ultimately I believe now from the Olympic system being disorganized. The DNR system is different. I think because it’s working at a, starting a different starting point. It’s working at the very kernel the base of the, of the illness itself, rather than trying to deal with the, the symptoms. The allergies are a symptom. They’re not the illness. So if you deal with the, the malfunction of the limbic system, which is causing this deranged behavior in your body, then you can get rid of the allergies. And I’m eating wheat .
We used to do terrible things to me, . I knew that the DNR system was key because on the second day, I had a miraculous experience. I was exposed to perfumes unexpectedly and had no reaction. And that hadn’t happened for the previous five years. I should have been really sick… and it didn’t happen. And so I knew that this was something different from that point on. I have not put on my mask. I have not put on my respirator to do anything. A couple days, well, a a after the third day, one of the things that I did was go out on and just walk in the neighborhood. And consciously I was aware of dryer vents and it didn’t have an effect on me. And so each little challenge was a, was a great victory. And just being able to walk was an enormous amount of freedom.
And so the contrast between the previous week, the week before the DNR program and the week after was just immense. But I’d been sick for five years, and so I had a lot of healing to do still. So even though I was ecstatic at all the new things that I could do, I still had needed some time to, to rebuild my body. And so I got back on my bicycle because before the thought of being on a bicycle and being knocked out, was, you know, if I had the energy to get on the bicycle in the first place, the idea that I might be exposed, well, having to balance myself, frightened me so I didn’t ride my bicycle. So at the week after, I could ride my bicycle and I could walk anywhere and bit by bit, i, I, my confidence came back so that I could feel fine about going into a grocery store. Feel fine about walking past the detergent aisle. Feel fine. Eventually, I, I had to find out whether this works. So I walked down the, the aisle in the laundry detergent and stood there amongst all those fumes and nothing happened to me. Since that time, I’ve been able to go, I’ve been into Canadian tires in several cities in two provinces, I’ve been on an airplane without wearing a respirator. I have, I, I’ve had a good experience in a dental chair.
And the previous time in the dental chair, I was, I had to be carted out by two people. I can go back to work soon. My food allergies are just about gone. I can eat wheat. When you can eat wheat, you can eat, eat a whole bunch of things. You can eat wheat and potatoes, and dairy products and chicken. I’ve even had garlic. I had some garlic sausages by accident in a restaurant. I can eat restaurants now. I’m getting my sea legs back. My life is so different now. So I’m left with this, this conundrum of what do I do now? Because I have a whole bunch of options, this month that I didn’t have a year ago. And it’s not only good for me, it’s good for the people I live with. It’s good for my friends. I hope it’ll be good for the people that I go back to work with.
The future is open. Now I have options. The DNR system had immediate beneficial results and I could see that this is different. Things are going to change and I didn’t have that with the other treatments. Annie has an unique constellation of talents. Besides being a wonderful woman, a compassionate woman, she’s quick to think on her feet. She’s quick to deal with issues as they arise. She is very, very skilled. I felt so confident about her ability to help people that I paid to have my sister go through the same program so that she could benefit from it. And she’s doing wonderfully now. She’s ecstatic now about having her life back. I can basically go anywhere, do anything now. I don’t want to do certain things. I don’t want to spend an evening in a perfume infested environment, but I can, and I have, .
