I have to throw away some clothes again

I don't know anybody who has ever done anything like this, except the authors of a book that I found on Google Books.  It's called Breaking Out of Environmental Illness.  And I disagreed with a lot of the conclusions they drew about environmental illness.  I haven't completely read the book, but from jumping around through it, I saw that they seem to think environmental illness and chemical sensitivity are, to some extent, 'all in the mind.'

However, I know about 'energy' treatments, and I have used Thought Field Therapy and also Emotional Freedom Techniques, both of which involve tapping or massaging parts of the skin with your fingertips.  I didn't use the types of energy treatments they used in the Environmental Illness book, though.  TFT and EFT both work for me, but not as well as they claim they do.  I can use them in a limited way, and they're very helpful as long as I am not expecting too much.  The treatments give me comfort and relaxation for a short time, but they don't permanently fix anything for me.

I think that the people in that book probably became so severely chemical sensitive through exposure to some kind of drug that causes you to become sensitive to other drugs.  St. John's Wort does that, sort of.  All drugs that interact with other drugs can make you more sensitive to other drugs and certain chemicals.  Or less sensitive to them.  SJW makes you 'less sensitive' to drugs that are metabolized through the cytochrome P450 pathway, but, in my experience, sjw made me overreact to several of the other herbs that I was handling at the time - stevia rebaudiana, ephedra, tobacco.  It seemed to make me more sensitive to them.

I tagged this 'grief and loss' because I had to throw away huge amounts of clothing when they got contaminated, and I cried and cried, and I took pictures of all the things I threw away in case I wondered where something was a few years from now.  But I was careful to keep the more sentimental things.  Still, I have had another contamination problem recently and I am going to have to throw away some more clothes, and I dread doing that because I get attached to a particular item of clothing, and I hate it that I can't completely stop the contamination outbreaks and incidents.

The contamination was from when I visited Mark in New York.  He had an anti-anxiety drug on his body, and after hugging and touching him, I got it on my clothing.  It took a day or two to realize that I had gotten hit with a drug that wasn't my own.  I washed the clothes, but, of course, it didn't completely wash out, which is like the rest of my experiences with washing drugs and herbal oils out of clothing.  So it got on a couple other items of clothing, and I am wearing a pair of pants right now that has a little bit of this drug on it.  And it's so hard to shop for clothing.  Goodwill is only open in the daytime, but I'm usually more active at night or late in the evening, and I tend to sleep in the early morning, or in the afternoon, when all the nine-to-five type businesses are open.  So I would have to get something at Wal-Mart, but when you have thrown away dozens and dozens of shirts and pants, you don't want to buy anything expensive, and so I've been trying to get the junk sale clothes that are only $0.25 at Goodwill, knowing that I will probably end up throwing some of them away.

It's frustrating, I find out ways to control the contamination, and then have another outbreak from an unexpected source.  I can't just avoid visiting everyone who is using prescription drugs.

I had gone to a Yahoo group about chemical sensitivity, and I vaguely recall that I told the story of contaminating my clothing with the essential oils of the medicinal herbs that I was handling.  They also got contaminated by some of the cleaning chemicals I was using on them, too, which probably contributed to some of the reactions I was having when I put on the clothes.  Anyway, nobody on that group said anything about having experienced something similar... And then, I didn't bother going back to post on that group or try talking anymore, because I was too busy dealing with my own disasters, so I never went back trying to find anybody with a similar experience.

I would like to wash these pants and try to keep them, but I know from experience that it might be five or six washings before I start to feel sure that I'm not reacting to them.

The closest things I found on the net about contaminations were some manuals from the government about what to do if you have to enter a meth lab.  They described ephedrine on surfaces and how it's able to go through the skin, and how in a meth lab, a lot of surfaces will get contaminated with the chemicals.

Nobody anywhere on the net described the experience that happened to me.  Since this is 'the blog world,' where people read whatever is most recent, I'll recap the story even though I've blogged about it more than once in the past on this blog and my other one.  I'll make it short.

Because I had chronic fatigue, I decided I wanted to plant and grow a couple of different herbal stimulants.  I bought the seeds of tobacco, cacao, coffee, camellia sinensis, and ephedra sinica.  All of them were okay except the ephedra.  Tobacco caused some problems, but nowhere near as bad as the ephedra.

I found out that merely handling and touching the seeds will do a couple of things.  It turns out that even the seeds - not yet even a full-grown plant - are covered with active medicinal oils that are transdermal and will go through the skin, causing a reaction.  It is as though you have ingested the drug, even though all you did was touch the seeds.  And this is true of ALL the medicinal herbs that I handled.  That includes Butterfly Weed, an orange flower whose seeds I bought because I wanted it for its beauty, not for its medicinal properties.  I reacted so badly just opening the package of seeds that I just threw them away and never touched them again.

The rest of the story:  After touching the seeds, I touched other objects in my house, and also my clothing.  Then, it turns out that the oils are almost impossible to wash out of clothes and carpets.  You can kind of remove them from smooth surfaces like plastic, but even then, you can still react to the oils from the really strong ones like ephedra.  The others weren't quite as bad.  The ephedra, however, caused feelings of intense panic, racing heart, and increased blood pressure.  I had tachycardia all the time.  I was also eating lots of chocolate at the time, which made the tachycardia worse, and nowadays I still notice my heart speeds up if I eat chocolate, but it doesn't bother me much unless it's happening at the same time as a reaction to some other drugs.  The drugs had interactions with each other, which made them worse than they were in isolation.

That's making a long story short.  And I haven't found anybody else on the net who has described anything like this happening to them.  The only similar thing was the people in that book who talked about contaminating large amounts of laundry and doing all kinds of weird things to try to clean them.  I don't know what chemical they got on the laundry - some of it was paint fumes, or something, I think, but I'm not sure.  But nobody else has talked about disasters involving transdermal herbs and having reactions to merely handling the seeds.

This is actually very important for people to know if they have environmental illness.  They could be wearing clothing that has gotten contaminated by touching something, or else they could be living or working in a location that has been contaminated.  And it doesn't have to be just medicinal herbs.  There are a lot of chemicals that go through the skin and cause reactions.  Now that I know about this, I'm observing them all the time.  Most of them are mild and I don't have much of a problem with them.  I don't have extremely severe chemical sensitivity to EVERYTHING.  My problem is mostly in my house and with my clothing.  But chemical-sensitive people need to know about the phenomenon of transdermal absorption.  Most drug and poison warnings make it sound like you can only get sick by actually drinking or eating something.

Yeah, there are good reasons why I never type directly into the Wordpress editor, and instead I type everything into my Opera notes that save constantly as you go.  A bunch of stuff I was typing just now got lost because of a computer lockup caused by the viruses, hackers, spyware, and overall garbage buildup screwing up this computer.   I was writing about circumcision and vaccines.  I don't know how much of it got lost.  I mentioned a book called Special-Needs Kids Eat Right: Strategies to Help Kids on the Autism Spectrum Focus, Learn, and Thrive: MPH, RD, LD, Judy Converse.  I mentioned leaky gut syndrome, the measles virus, the strain of DNA from the cultivated measles used for vaccines, and how it has been found growing in people's intestines and causing the problems with absorbing large molecules they aren't supposed to absorb.  I mentioned how this reminded me of my problem with absorbing these herbs through the skin, and how it could analogously be called 'Leaky Skin Syndrome.'  Since measles targets the skin, maybe it really DOES affect skin absorption.

I had also mentioned that I would not vaccinate my future children, or circumcise them, and said that if those things became mandatory, then they would pry my children from my cold dead hands.  They might make circumcision mandatory because of the bullcrap about how it prevents AIDS and STDs and herpes, which it doesn't.  I was writing about what a huge, steaming pile of crap this really was, and it was about then that the computer locked up.  I also had said that I won't be arguing about the 'circumcision prevents AIDS' lie, because other people on the net had already done a very good job disproving everything the government tells us about circumcision.  Maybe I'll write about it some other time or put it in another blog.