Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Don’t get me wrong the adventure of the previous year and a half had not been a complete waste of time. In some significant ways I did feel better. I was stronger than I had been in many years. My cholesterol was a very healthy 95. I been suffering from an intolerance to wheat gluten before the experiment and after it seemed to be completely gone. I had lost weight. But the one thing I really wanted had not come, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome (MCS) was still an unending reality.

In recovery from alcohol there is narrative I like to use:

“No One Ever Really Drinks Alone”. I loved to tell new arrivals to recovery this and then let them unravel. They would tell me stories about how, at least in the end, much/most of the drinking they did was done with no one else around. When they were done I’d let them know that I too liked to drink with no one else in the room, but that the imagined self-sufficiency of the lone drinker was only an illusion. I would explain that when I did drink I went to the store and bought the alcohol. I had to go to a job and get the money to buy the alcohol where I interacted with others and trusted that my boss would pay me for the work done. Teams of people were needed to grow the crops that then would be distilled to the gin I used to enjoy. Other teams of people would gather the recourses to make the bottle I drank the gin from. I didn’t build the house I drank it in. In the end, every sip I took, I owed to perhaps thousands of other people who took part in the process of creating my experience of getting drunk.

I would then say, “If you could not really drink alone than what makes you think you can get sober alone” (one of the great fallacies that everyone new to recovery believes is that they don’t need others to get better, that they can do it on their own). Just as each of us needed to go to the store and buy our favorite drink each of us needs to go out and find someone who has the recovery we are looking for. Nobody really drinks alone and nobody recovers alone.

Of course I completely failed to take my own advise. At least as far as MCS was concerned. I believed I was on my own and that I had to do it all myself. Once again my best thinking had gotten me to a place I did not want to be.

My mentor in recovery was a chiropractor. His office was not too far from where I lived and about once a week he would give me a chiropractic adjustment and we would talk about how things were going. Now I don’t really know if seven years of chiropractic adjustments helped with MCS recovery but I do believe that it certainly didn’t hurt anything.

About this time a husband and wife team rented a pair of rooms in the same offices as my mentor. The husband was a naturopath and the wife was a homeopath. I must admit that I didn’t really know much about either discipline but I did know that I could no longer just plow through recovery from MCS on my own. I needed help. I booked a set of appointments with them for the following week and purposely did not educate myself on what to expect. I simply threw up my hands in surrender and trusted in the universe while I waited for a new adventure.

When I talked to the husband and wife team a small miracle happened; they both had not only heard of MCS but they had also encountered others like me over their years of practice. They were the first health care professionals who believed me when I told them of my experience of living with MCS. They also had faith that they could help me get better. I was excited to see what would happen.

The first appointment was with the husband, the naturopath. He looked at the iris of my eye, talked about what my concerns where, and where I wanted to get to health wise. We talked about many possible health issues including; sleep patterns, physical energy levels and digestion. At the end of the appointment he put me on a battery

of supplements for liver cleansing and rebuilding. He put me on supplements for healing some of the damage I most likely caused to my digestive track while fasting. I went home with an array of bottles that I put on my counter and labeled 1x, 2x, and 3x. Each morning, afternoon and evening I would take a small hand full of often foul smelling pills. In a few days I got into the rhythm of the regimen and before I knew it I felt absolutely awful. Of course feeling worse before getting better seemed to be a normal pattern in recovery from MCS at this point, so I didn’t worry and waited to see where this new path would take me.

Next it was time to see the wife, the homeopath. At this point I knew nothing about homeopathy and had no idea what to expect. Before the visit I sat in the waiting room and filled out a lengthy questionnaire that asked about everything from my favorite foods to how I felt about my relationship with my mother. I had seen psych evaluation forms that did not seem this in-depth. After I completed the paperwork I went in and talked to her about many of the questions on the form. We must have talked for almost an hour. At the end of the interview process she got up, poured over some reference books while occasionally muttering ‘Oh’ or ‘Ah’. She then walked over to a large cabinet that had perhaps a hundred small drawers, pulled out a little paper packet from one of the drawers

and put a measured amount of its contents into tiny paper cup. Inside the cup were several dozen uneven white spheres about a millimeter in diameter that looked as if they were made of sugar. She told me to put the contents of the cup under my tongue and let them dissolve. The granules tasted like sugar. I was absolutely mystified. Had I just spent the last two hours waiting to be given a placebo? After her many years of practice she must have anticipated my questions and gave me a book entitled simply enough ‘Homeopathy’.

I read all one hundred plus pages that evening and found the answers I was looking for. Homeopathy was like nothing I had encountered before. It is based on the premise that if you give the body a little of something it will learn how to deal with a lot of it. It posits that every substance taken into the body will have an effect on it. This effect is called a Symptom Cluster. So if a person takes an incredibly small amount of substance X then they will exhibit symptom cluster Y. The way homeopathic treatments works is, the practitioner will start by finding out what your symptoms are for your particular disease state. Then they will match your symptoms with a known symptom cluster caused by a certain substance. Finally they will give you an incredibly small amount of that substance. The result is that your body will naturally adapt to that substance and symptom cluster, thus causing your body to heal from the disease state causing the same symptoms. This seemed a little ‘far out’ for my college educated, overly rational brain to accept but I had to remember that my best thinking was simply not getting me the results I was looking for. I needed to try something different.

In about a week the worst of it was over. A week or so after that I felt even better then when I had started to explore this new option. In about a month I had experienced more real recovery from MCS then I had in the entire previous year and a half. Perhaps I had found something that was actually working.

It was time for a second round of visits. The homeopath appointment was about the same as before, just shorter. She felt that everything was going according to plan and she gave me a second set of granules to dissolve under my tongue. This time I didn’t really feel all that bad after the treatment, in fact I felt kind of good.

In the naturopath appointment things took a slightly different approach from the previous time. The liver support treatments were working well, he felt it was time to look at my sleep patterns. He sent me home with a kit to measure the level of hormones that control our natural patterns of being asleep and being awake. Three times a day at pre-prescribed intervals I put a cotton swab in my mouth and then put it into a sealed plastic bag. When I had used up all the cotton swabs I mailed the box off to the lab. A couple of weeks later I went back in for the results. He told me his eyes almost bulged out of his head like a surprised cartoon character when he saw the results. My sleep patterns were about as messed up as was humanly possible. He gave me even more pills to take. These new supplements would try and return my natural sleep cycle back to normal. I also started taking long lasting Sudafed before bed to open up my sinuses and help my night time breathing. In less than a month I was waking up feeling rested and energized, something I had not felt in many years.

I continued to see this husband and wife team over the next nine months or so. Recovery continued to happen for that entire time and for an extended period after. I took the liver support supplements for almost two years before my body no longer needed them. During this time I got some surgery on my nose to open up my sinuses to help me breath better especially while I slept.

This time period my not have seen a cure of MCS for me but it did see an very drastic reduction in symptoms. Because I actually felt good (perhaps not yet great) a lot of the time I could see a dramatic shift in symptoms when a MCS trigger would come my way. I was learning, at a rapid pace, what to avoid and what was ok to have in my environment. For the first time in what seemed to be an eternity I had not only hope for MCS recovery but was actually beginning to experience the fruits of that recovery.

Perhaps there was actually going to be a way out of the purgatory that I had condemned myself to over a decade before.

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