I stumbled on a blog this morning called Today, written by Janelle, who lives in the New England Tablelands in NSW Australia. It’s an incredibly sweet blog, and Janelle’s heart is on every page.
Today she writes about her struggles with chemical sensitivities; it’s a good read about her realization that her tolerance levels are becoming more pronounced. But what I found most fascinating was her description about crying after an exposure. She says about a particularly bad exposure to a chemical in a public toilet, “Alan realised that I wasn’t getting hysterical about it because I was angry…I was trying to explain what happened and that I was having problems breathing and getting the smell out of my hair and the hysterics WAS THE REACTION to the poison.”
You know, I have this happen also: suddenly starting to cry during or after and exposure. As I commented to Janelle: “I wanted to tell you that I have had chemical sensitivities for over 15 years and sometimes one of the side effects of exposure to a toxic chemical is suddenly crying and/or feeling panic. When it’s happening, I am very aware that the emotional responses are being directly caused BY the chemicals, i.e., the emotional response is being triggered directly by the chemical itself, NOT by an emotional response to the exposure.”
Here’s Janelle’s description of the experience:
[...] recently I was bombed 3 days in a row; Michael had a visit to the hair salon and the ‘product’ in his hair was revolting. The next day Alan and the boys decided to shoot deodorant cans with David’s hunting bow…I actually had to go bed, and I was in tears. The third day we went on bushwalk and one of our friends had his smelly boy’s deo on* and the cumulative effect was that I was much slower than the others getting up that climb.
To top it off though, last week on the way home from Sydney, we stopped at a roadside pit toilet, very conveniently put there by the Roads Dept. but an unsuspecting disaster site for me. There had been some kind of (deodorising?) powder put down the pit which was released when urine hit it from above. Great image I know, but I could see it vapourising! To tell the short story though, Alan realised that I wasn’t getting hysterical about it because I was angry…I was trying to explain what happened and that I was having problems breathing and getting the smell out of my hair and the hysterics WAS THE REACTION to the poison. This shocked us both and when I got home I had to ring my friend and tell her about it; not to gossip but as warning – if the same thing happened to her she would likely have collapsed in there!
It is often difficult to get sympathetic responses to these issues because much of the research is anecdotal (and is often documented badly). But personal experience can’t be denied so I am sharing all of this kind of hoping I’m not the only one (I know I’m not) but also to hopefully get you to realise what it can be like for other people.
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