rejoining regular life

In the last couple of days, I've gone on two group bike rides, about 30 miles each, during mold season. My first real bike rides since 2004. During mold season. I'm sore, but that's a badge of honor.

more progress, but different

I'm not going to talk about me this time. For the benefit of people with chemical sensitivities on top of some other disease, I'm going to talk about my friend the really, really sick lady, who, one of these days, is going to need a different pseudonym.

My friend has Th1 disease (as defined on the Marshall Protocol website) on top of or as the cause of MCS and fibromyalgia. To tackle the MCS and fibro, we did DNRS together, and she's doing some energy work, which neither of us understand at all, but those two things are helping. She gets stronger every week, and she is fully present now, cracking jokes, passing information between caregivers whose shifts don't overlap, and teasing her husband. Back around six months ago, I hate to say this, but she pretty much just sat like a lump or slept, because if you feel crappy enough, that's about all you can pull off.

The inflammation (read: pain) from the Th1 disease didn't seem to change much with those treatments. But since she was doing better, she decided to try a modified version of the Marshall Protocol, which approached head-on, involves taking a lot of Benicar, a blood pressure drug with a very reasonable track record, along with a very low dose antibiotic. The Benicar does indeed lower your blood pressure, but it has the side effect of killing intracellular bacteria, which you then have to detox, and you get a major light-sensitivity problem. (That's actually a diagnostic tool -- if you get light-sensitive from Benicar, you have Th1 disease.) The antibiotic is supposed to make all that go smoother, and I imagine it does, but people who are really, really sick cannot handle those kinds of things.

Thus my friend is taking an eighth of a Benicar (around 5 mg) mostly every day with no antibiotic ever, and her pain is decreasing. She can get a funny reaction if she gets too much (those pills are hard to cut into eighths), but she hasn't had any trouble with light sensitivity.

So there you go: the state of my friend, who needs a new pseudonym.

update on EFT

Last week I learned that modified EFT really helps me. Six years ago, I learned that straight-up EFT really pissed me off.

What I learned comes from Planet Thrive, which is one of the good EI sites, which means positive instead of oh-my-god-we're-all-going-to-be-sick-forever. A guy who goes by 'T-Can' did DNRS like I did, but after a while he got stuck. My progress lately has been as good as stuck, even though I'm a lot better than I was. His solution, instead of inching forwards, was to try something else, so he tried EFT and WHEE and HAMR. I freely admit that I don't yet have a clue about WHEE and HAMR, but his version of EFT totally works for me. You don't have to say any stilted phrases. You tap various accupuncture points while singing the first line of 'Happy Birthday' (or a similar simple something) and then counting to five. Maybe if I hadn't tried DNRS first it wouldn't have worked, but with that as a background, the procedure is easy, I understand the point, and there's a part where you get to pat yourself on the top of the head. (What can I say -- I'm easily amused.)

So now I'm sleeping with an ordinary polyester pillow for the first time since 2004, and I have to say that it is a huge step up from a rock-hard balled-up organic cotton blanket for a pillow. I use power tools without fear that I will remove fingers or lose an eye. I can run two miles cross-country without stopping one day and go for a bike ride the next day, where my husband says I keep up better than I have in years. I sat in a doctor's waiting room for half an hour that two weeks ago I left immediately, despite my success repeatedly sitting in an accounting classroom last semester. (Seriously, I don't know what that doctor's patients do with their spare time, but it smells like they recreationally soak themselves in bug repellant.)

The biggest change for me is that when I feel weird, I can do the tapping, or just some of the tapping (the points on your hands are inconspicuous), and I feel normal. Not like I normally felt up until last week, but just straight-up normal. That little edge of tension that I just couldn't conquer goes away. I haven't felt normal since 2005, and I distinctly remember it. It lasted for about three hours after an acupuncture visit that cost $50, and since no one can afford $50 twice a day and maybe once at night seven days a week, what I'd heard was that acupuncture treated symptoms, and feeling normal for a little while gave you the confidence to go make yourself really, really sick before you saw the acupuncturist again.

All I have to do now is catch up on things like deferred house maintenance and figure out what I want to do when I grow up -- accounting or engineering. One of my doctors remarked that engineers are old and sick by the time they retire, but people who work for themselves can work at a reasonable pace until they're eighty, so those extra years in school might be totally worth it.

high scores and losing control

So since I haven't updated this in months, no one is going to read this, but I learned something today. I'm taking an accounting class so I can practice controlling my fight-or-flight reflex in a room full of college students, which boils down to inhaling laundry chemicals and who knows what else for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week while learning obscure facts (obscure to physicists, anyway). Accounting, according to the prof, is hard. According to the college students, accounting is hard. According to someone with a graduate degree in a hard science, accounting is pretty straightforward, but it's harder if you are trying to recover from a neurotoxin-induced brain injury.

The long and short of it is that we had our first test, I got 100%, and I was really pleased, but I couldn't calm down and pay attention in class after we got the tests back. So fight-or-flight is not only about being freaked out -- it can also be about simply being wound up.

Next time I ace a test, I will think calm thoughts about how grateful I am to have a functioning brain.

Next up: jury duty. We'll see what happens.

10 months in

Today I thought about it, and I realized that the very recent tendonitis/inflammation in my foot could be coming from having surgery two weeks ago, during mold and pollen season, and then going to my first bar since probably college, on a Saturday night, while I was in the middle of a hormone reaction.

In retrospect, maybe it wasn't the greatest move, but those high heels I wore were cute.

early six month update

Since I haven't been updating reliably, and now there's too much to say, here's a list of stuff:

• bisphenol A lingers in your system
• styrene will kill you
• I had major gut surgery in the beginning of June, and it went great. I've been healing faster than the doctor is used to, so all those years of learning to recuperate must have been good for something.
• Pain triggers my fight-or-flight reflex, so it's still a little out-of whack, but I just need more practice keeping it settled down.
• I practiced almost exclusively in the sauna over the last few months, so I feel great in there. If I don't get in there for a few days, like after surgery, things are not as good, so I need to practice on the couch. Also standing at the sink doing dishes.
• I'm still sensitive to moderate-range air quality problems, but mid-moderate instead of almost-good moderate.

So now I'm contemplating a different, minor surgery that I'd been putting off, but that can wait another few months. How many EIs do you meet who have a couple of surgeries saved up who actually want to go through with the second one? Getting your lumps and bumps taken out so they don't hurt anymore is really beyond description.

four month update, really late

I have this problem where stuff that happens as a result of my 'staging a miraculous recovery' sounds too weird to post, so I put off posting it. It's time to erase it or throw it out there, so here is what I wrote at the end of April, in all its weirdness:

Instead of learning anything today, I'm going to report on how things are going four months after I gained control of my fight-or-flight reflex.

This is the first year you haven't heard about pollen season, and we're right in the middle of it. I still sometimes wake up with heart palpitations around 4:30 am, but I can usually make them go away. Not without a struggle, but they go away. The first few days something new starts blooming I can't always get myself settled down, but after that the 'switch' just requires a little extra vigilance, like when I first started this whole thing.

This improvement is balanced by the fact that I have been having an increasingly hard time tolerating other EIs. Anyone who is detoxing anything makes me sick fast, and if I don't leave fast enough, I even feel it the next day. At first I thought it was just EIs who'd gotten into mold, in which case I could blame it on my immune system, which, freed from reacting to any old thing, started really going to town on anything mold-related. Now it looks like it's not that specific, because now I react to mail from EIs, some of whom I am pretty sure don't have any mold problems at all. I don't seem to have trouble with other mail, like bills, beyond the annoyance factor of having to pay them.

I have decided to lay the blame on a sebaceous cyst that's going away. (I didn't know they did that.) My doctor said cysts like that are places your body parks stuff it can't detoxify right away, and it looks like my body, in the spirit of working through the backlog, has decided to start in on the cyst. I imagine there are all kinds of detox products in there since it grew while I was really ill, so now I'm detoxing my detox products. Thus, my system is not prepared to deal with anyone else's detox products.

So that's my theory, and if it sounds made up, that's because it is.

more things that'll kill you

I'd tell you what I learned today, but I can't think of it right now, so here's what actually stuck from recent events.

A week ago I went to a meeting of the local sick people group, and we had a speaker on how the FCC and smartmeters are trying to kill us.

• The FCC: maintaining the switched network phone system is getting burdensome for phone companies, so they want the FCC to stop making them maintain it. Conventional wisdom is that all of us can just use cell phones or VOIP, which ignores the fact that people with EHS (that's electromagnetic hypersensitivity) have a terrible time with cell phones (that's obvious -- normies worry about those) and computers. Computers come with things like power supplies and fans, which are just electrically noisy or create magnetic fields. Plus, you haven't seen a tri-field meter max out until you've put it near a computer monitor. The EHS community is pulling out all the stops for this. They have enough trouble without having to give up phones and switch back to US mail, which, when you need to ask a store a question, is just not going to cut it these days.
  
  The problem arises when they rope in other people. Apparently you get more protesters if you use some fear tactics, like explaining that people can listen in on your cell phone conversations, which hasn't been true for something like ten years. The most annoying argument they're using is that people with Alzheimer's will not be able to figure out how to make a phone call over the computer. I want to say, "You know how I know you don't know anything about VOIP?" but they don't. They can't use computers without frying themselves.
  
  I really wish people would wise up and recognize EHS in its own right, so then they wouldn't have to say stupid stuff to get attention. (Also, it's electrical noise, not 'dirty electricity,' but whatever, said the nerd. And the nerd just said EHS is real because it is, and I'm a physicist, so I learned critical thinking, thank you.)
  
  
• On smartmeters: Apparently the EHS community is not worried about power companies transmitting information over power lines. You can get plug-in filters that take the noise off your household wires, and then you're all set. This solution will still not make ARRL happy, since their antennas are outside.

In other news, bisphenol A will still kill you, but at least it comes out of your system pretty fast when you stop ingesting it.

what is wrong with the air now?

For the record, this is what's going on in air quality around here according to the EPA:

...Several questions from around Arizona have come in concerning the unusual haziness across the Phoenix forecast area. There haven't been any major winds in the past several days and it's been less than a week since our last "major" rain. So what's going on? A deeper look into the situation uncovers a possible phenomenon that occurs every now and then known as an Asian Dust event. Every so often a large dust storm rolls off the coast of China, most often originating in the Mongolian Desert. This dust cloud is transported across the Pacific Ocean and sweeps through the western U.S. This particular event made landfall Thursday in Baja, Mexico and southern California (http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/FIRE/DATA/SMOKE/2011D150314.html). Friday's report has this haze spreading as far east as New Mexico and western Texas.... According [to] the current monitored air quality levels, there are no health concerns at the surface associated to this upper-level dust event....

So EIs definitely feel this kind of event, and husband wondered yesterday if normies felt it, too, but didn't know any better. He had some errands to run and observed that people in general seemed kind of cranky and preoccupied.

snake accidents, post-breast-cancer fatigue, and death in a bag of sugar

Today I learned that if you watch a 4' snake crawl along the top of a cinderblock wall, wobbling a little, the snake could screw up and fall off. It makes a louder-than-expected thump when it hits the ground, even accounting for it landing on an aloe plant. (The snake was fine -- it didn't even look embarrassed while I laughed my ass off as it slithered away.)

In other news, about a third of breast cancer survivors have lasting fatigue such that their norepinephrine (a stress hormone) levels rise more than expected when given a somewhat stressful task. Initially the fatigue comes from chemotherapy, but the lasting fatigue appears to come from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems being out of balance. The sympathetic nervous system, the thing in charge of stress hormones and your fight-or-flight reflex, is an energy hog, and it makes people tired. The researchers mentioned they had another study going looking into whether yoga could help straighten these people out.

As someone who had to gain voluntary control over my fight-or-flight reflex, I can tell them now that yoga won't fix it. Lying on the floor doing relaxation exercises won't fix it. Exercise, something they're looking into, helps, but won't fix it either, particularly if you're fatigued enough that you can't do things like ride your bike for four hours at a time.

I was telling an EI about my experience with fight-or-flight the other day, and he said it must have been hard to be fearful all the time. I wasn't. I was depressed and sometimes anxious, and didn't process information or chemicals quickly.

Exposure to chemicals, even voluntary ones like chemotherapy, ramps up your fight-or-flight reflex gradually (if it does at all). You don't see it coming. If you constantly tried to fight or run, people might figure out that there was a problem with your fight-or-flight reflex. They don't. It's not obvious, and yoga isn't going to uncondition somebody's sympathetic nervous system unless there's something going on there that I haven't heard about.

Also, sugar and high fructose corn syrup will kill you. Sucrose is half glucose, which your whole body processes, and half fructose, which your liver handles. If you get too much fructose at once, your liver turns it straight into fat, which leads to a fatty liver, a key part of metabolic syndrome, which will totally kill you because then you'll get type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The trick is figuring out how much is too much, and no one wants to put a number on it. The best number I came up with was the amount of sugar the FDA thought typical Americans ate in 1986, back when we, as a nation, were not so wide. They said 40 lbs/year/person, which is 200 calories of added sugar per day. The USDA, considered much more reliable, said 75 lbs/year/person.

So I was going to figure that 200 calories of sugar per day is a reasonable upper limit -- that's like a quarter of a batch of cookies, which, after my initial 'I can eat cookies again' phase, is not something that will ever again occur here on a daily basis -- but then, toward the end of the article, it starts talking about cancer. Trying to handle all that insulin makes your cells go nuts and sometimes turn cancerous. Cancer started rising way before 1986, so we're unsafe at any speed.

things you can't do even if you're feeling much better

Yesterday I learned that doing homeless EIs' laundry is a good way to contaminate your dryer and not just one, but both washers.

Here's how you do it: you wash a bunch of new t-shirts in your auxiliary washer for one of the homeless ladies, mostly following her directions. Then she comes over and sniffs (and touches) the shirts, each one, probably more than once, and also touches the giant glass jars they were in. She still reacts to the shirts, and you're reacting to her at this point, so you say you'll keep washing them until they're ok.

So you go inside, and since you washed the jars just an hour ago, you put them over near the washer and dryer, and without examining the situation, you put your own stuff from the good washer into the dryer.

At this point, you suck whatever the heck is coming out of the homeless lady and getting onto everything she touches into your dryer, contaminating it and your clothes. Plus you put her stuff back into the auxiliary washer, liberally coating the inside of that with whatever it is. When you take your stuff out of the dryer, you get a surprise, so you try to wash it out in the good washer, which just doesn't work on this stuff. Ta da!

So now both washers and the dryer have been scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, which probably only took about six hours this time, and I learned my lesson.

lousy food and frying electric company customers

This evening I learned that it's not worth buying Chinese food even if you tolerate it because it's so salty that it just tastes like salt. I have that at home.

In other news, I got curious about smart meters because there's such an uproar about them in the electromagnetically-sensitive (ES) subset of the EI community, and last I heard, PG&E (in the SF Bay Area) wanted to charge people something like $20/mo to opt out and have a dumb meter. I was, before I got sick, a radio frequency (RF) engineer, so I thought maybe there would be some thing you could do to filter out frequencies entering the house or cut down on electrical noise. We'll get to that, but here's what I learned:

• You can have a one-way or two-way RF network connecting the utility company to people's houses. With one-way, meters throw out information at some interval to a local collector, which then sends the information to the utility over the phone or the internet. Two-way communication lets the utility do things like send meter upgrades or turn on or off service. Either way, that's like having a small, intermittent radio station or cell tower (depending on implementation) on the side of your house.
• Another data collection arrangement is where all the local meters play telephone with their information, passing it down the line and going around any obstacles, like broken meters. That takes more power because more data gets shuffled around, and that would only make things worse on the side of your house.
• Worst case scenario, your electric company decides to use power-line communication (PLC), where they send an RF signal over the local power lines, seeing as they own them and all. This kind of thing really, really upsets the ham radio guys (ARRL) because it makes a lot of interference, and I cannot imagine something like that going over at all well with people with electromagnetic sensitivities.

So what's the solution? A mediocre solution would be to put the transmitter out on the end of a wire as far as possible from the house, and then you'd need to put a bunch of chokes or something in there to keep it from acting like an antenna and bringing the signal right back to the house. A really lousy solution would be to build a nice Faraday cage in your house to hide in, but then you'd be caged, which sucks. A better solution, which I'm sure they would have thought of and must have rejected for some reason, probably expense, is to have meters call in using the household phone line every night at 2 am or something. Sure, it's not data at 5 minute intervals, but you don't have to send somebody out to peer at a dumb meter.

Seriously, if PG&E is expecting about 150,000 households to opt out, it seems likely that, given economies of scale, someone could come up with a phone-home meter for a semi-reasonable price.

cell phones and math skills

Today I learned that cell phones cause bone density decreases. At least it will have in your hip if you're a man who has carried your phone on your hip for at least a year.

Also, all those math skills I was working to resurrect last year just work now. Just thinking about it, it appears that there's some quantum mechanics floating around in my head, too, but if I someday get to be an engineer again, I don't think I'll need that.

first sentence = EI bragging

I may not tolerate vinyl, greatly complicating my attempts at setting up gut surgery, but I tolerate Alka Seltzer Plus Cold Sparkling Original. Hopefully this won't go like the Halloween candy thing, where the second exposure didn't go so well.

In similar news, if you blow your nose on paper towels when you have the worst cold in human history, you don't get a clown nose. We did an unplanned study at our house, and my husband looks like a normal human, but I look like Bozo with a pink Hitler mustache.

things you can do with water bottle sleeves

Today I learned that you can get stainless steel water bottles at Ross Dress for Less for $3. Also, I have a waist pack for hiking that takes some finagling to securely hold a stainless steel water bottle, and today my husband figured out that this one kind of large beer bottle fits in the same way.

In getting-less-sick news, that thing where your body is supposed to handle bad stuff you inhale, and then you excrete it? My body is handling it now, but the end result is something I'm going to call garbage gut and leave it at that. My armpits hurt less now, so there's that.

not funny, but at least informative

Today I learned that an EI friend of mine has been able to replicate my results with the fight-or-flight reflex. She has chronic Lyme and electromagnetic sensitivities on top of mold exposure, but she's detoxing hard, just like I am. She was able to talk on the phone with me longer than she expected to, so as I expected, it appears to work on ES, too.

She called before, about a week or so ago, asking about Annie Hopper's workshop, thinking I had attended. I told her I hadn't, but I sent her specifically to the article on 'naming the feeling.' I know I said that getting the feeling named correctly was key for me, but she said that separating thought and feeling for her really helped. There's something to it no matter what you take away from it, and I am really, really pleased that it's working for someone else.

Now I have higher hopes for the really, really sick lady. She has something that if it isn't chronic Lyme, is darned similar, and really bad ES. I just gotta keep working on her.

Something else I learned is that the really successful bloggers share their pain, but they have more common kinds of pain, so I bet it's easier for other people to relate. But in the spirit of sharing the pain, stuff is coming out of my system fast enough that if I don't sweat it out in time, my armpits ache, and then they start to sting and ache. To avoid that, I exercise and sauna, which sends irritants out through your skin and out into your excretory system, which sometimes makes my guts hurt until I can get the stuff all the way out. I weigh an extra three pounds, some of which could be new muscle mass. I'm losing pudge consistently, and I was not all that pudgy to start with.

things that'll kill you

Today I learned that a common insecticide will make your children stupid. But since diet soda and energy drinks will kill them off when they get to be teenagers, it probably won't be a problem. In the unlikely event they survive to adulthood, they'll probably end up on a commute train at some point, which will definitely finish them off.

Another thing that could kill you? A husband who rode on an airplane. His bag smells better than he does, and it didn't even take a shower.

working on the backlog

Today I learned that I can tolerate the infrared backrest thingies in the sauna again, so I'm assuming that means I'm getting somewhere on the backlog of stuff I didn't detox when I should have. And I know that sentence won't make any sense to the people who visit this blog looking for information on shoplifting tools*, but I'm busy detoxing stuff, so I'm tired.

In related news, two nights ago I reacted to fireplace smoke again at 3:30 am. It took a while to figure that out -- I was worried that I'd gotten in trouble with the 10-day-old latex mattress part we added to the bed. Even after I figured out the problem, I didn't want to tempt fate, so I finished the night on the couch.

Last night, I reacted at 2:45, but I knew it was smoke, so I turned off the reaction and went back to sleep. I ended up sleeping lightly because I had to keep turning it off, but I know I'll learn to do it totally unconsciously if it keeps up. I learned to tuck in my dog in my sleep, so I don't see how untensing could be harder.


*I still get more hits from that than anything else, despite the fact I never did report anything useful.

switch flipping and complications of surgery

Today I learned that other people besides the ones I mentioned can flip people's brain switches. In particular, there's a -- and to mainstream America this sounds doubly awful -- French shaman who comes to town sometimes who can do it. He's done it for two people I know, and the reason I hadn't heard about it before is that one had moved out of town beforehand, and the grapevine was having a really hard time processing what the other one was saying. I'm sure the 'French shaman' thing was a big part of it, but also the grapevine is (rightly) extremely skeptical when it comes to miracle cures.

The post I wrote on Dec. 29 got into the southern Arizona sick-people newsletter (which has a much wider audience than my little blog), so I got a call directly from the local lady who saw the shaman. She acknowledged that it had taken pretty direct arm-twisting by someone she knew to get her to see the shaman initially, and that when she went, with a 'what the heck' attitude, she had no expectation of getting better. She said it was a bunch of 'woo-woo' stuff, but now she is very hopeful that since I described a mechanism for the switch, the grapevine will get past the 'French shaman' part, and maybe some other people can feel better.

I don't actually expect very many people to try it because people have a knack for knowing what's going to work for them. Sometimes they're just pessimistic and paranoid, but I knew the Christian-faith-based approach -- which is horribly controversial, and sometimes really fixes people up -- wouldn't work for me. In that approach, you have to get right with God by forgiving everybody and yourself for everything, then God forgives you, and you're healed. Which sounds suspiciously like you get God to flip your switch, so it's the same thing.

I'd bet I get hate mail over this, but not very many people read it. Moving on to the surgery part.

I have to have abdominal surgery if I want one part of my anatomy to stop pushing on another part, and there's a kidney involved, so all the doctors agree that I should have surgery. I found the right doctor, I scheduled the surgery, I called the hospital to bug the anesthesiologists to talk to me, but they didn't call back before my pre-op appointment.

Today I had my pre-op testing appointment, where they expect to draw blood, ask some easy questions, and send you on your way. The coordinating nurse ended up calling in not only a stray anesthesiologist, but also the pharmacy director because at the start, it looked like it would be impossible to get glass bottles for the IVs, even though I had the name and number of a pharmacy that provides them. (I got to sniff an IV bottle. It was very, very obviously vinyl, and pretty death-defying.) So tomorrow the pharmacy guy is going to call my doctor, the God of EIs, in Dallas and the pharmacy with the glass bottles. I, too, will be talking to my doctor to find out if an OR stocked almost entirely with PVC stuff is the best I can do, or if I have to go to Dallas and have surgery there, which will cost a freaking s***load because you have to rent a room you may or may not tolerate.

The poor anesthesiologist thought that vinyl was stable, so he wasn't clear on how anyone could have a problem with it. I've been sick long enough that I was a little surprised, and I said that I got heart palpitations if I inhaled near it, very likely in a tone of voice that implied that I didn't care if he thought vinyl was stable. He seemed ok with that.

Genghis Khan and rhodium

Today I learned that Genghis Khan et al. killed 40 million people, which comes out to about a tenth of the world's population. I say 'about' because the world population dropped from an estimated 450 million people before the plague (1348-1350) to 350 or 375 million afterward.

In other news, rhodium is the world's rarest precious metal, and if you're a terribly smart investor, you can buy a little vial of rhodium powder to sell to your friends, or you could name it 'the precious,' and clutch it to your chest, preferably while muttering something moderately unintelligible.

things we already know, with bad news

Today I confirmed that stress improves your eyesight. My one-person study of me had already concluded that I might need glasses again, having not worn them since I got sick. This is the only downside to not being all screwed up.

In other news, researchers have confirmed that using HEPA filters in your house if you live in a smoky area improves your health. [Bad news alert] Which only reminds me that the EI community in Tucson lost somebody over the holidays, and we don't know exactly why yet, but I do know the person in question was highly sensitive to air quality, and we liked her. [End bad news]

ears can breathe a sigh of relief

Tonight I noticed that I'm way more flexible than I was a month ago. I'm still not back where I was before I got sick, but playing the fiddle in tune is so much easier because my arm does that twisty thing again that you have to do. Playing out of tune had been sucking all the fun out of it.

still working on it

Today around 5 am I learned that I can turn off that grinding pain under my ribs on the right side that I get every time I have a hormone reaction. It has something to do with serotonin, and I don't remember what, but I can turn it off. Over and over again, because internal reactions are harder for me to deal with than the usual temporary inhalant-type reactions. The thing is that I eventually got to go back to sleep, which was much better than my old approach of just getting up and feeling a grinding pain under my ribs all day.

In honor of only mostly having that reaction under control*, we ended up at the mall again. This time we went to the dead mall, which has three anchor stores, and that's all. All the other stores are more recent and live in the parking lot, like a fairy ring. The halls were empty, so they were easy. Then it turned out that the JCPenney didn't have a perfume counter, so I got to go wander around a department store.

So now the trick is going to be going in a store in the newer mall, but I'm not going to try that for a while.


* Not really. Really, we're just not that bright sometimes.

things I forgot to mention

It has come to my attention that I was writing to the newsletter editor when I mentioned the other brain retraining website, so here is Gupta Amygdala Retraining™. The explanation part is pretty helpful, but you will be extremely aware that Mr. Gupta got a real medical paper published in 2002. In a real journal. In 2002.

Which could be a red flag for fakery, but he has a money-back guarantee, plus he sent out his dvds to well known people in the chronic fatigue community, no strings attached, and got what look like good reviews.

Also, gun ranges smell like smoke, which can get a little old after a while, even outdoors.

this is about armpits

Today we went on a probably-ill-advised, spontaneous experimental quick mosey through the mall, where we got dosed with so much perfume that I had to put our clothes in a plastic bag when we got home. I think the problem was inside the cell phone store, but you could smell the Abercrombie & Fitch store outdoors for a lot longer than you could the perfume store next to it, which I guess is not too surprising since I understand they spray their smell out the door.

In news of why the trip to the mall was probably extra stupid, I've been detoxing something to the extent that it made the lymph nodes under my arms sore. (I read in the testimonials part of one of the brain retraining websites I've been talking about that somebody else got sore lymph nodes, too, so it's not just me.) This morning I had to get in the sauna to sweat the whatever out because I realized my general crankiness could easily have been attributable to the stinging in my armpits. Whatever it is wants out, and I can't get it out fast enough.

And I have always tolerated using the infrared backrest thingy in the sauna on at least low; today I got heart palpitations on any setting other than 'off,' and no amount of attempting to settle down my fight-or-flight reflex changed it at all. I'm hoping the whatever it is leaves soon.

fastest air-out in the west

Yesterday I got a brand new book, something I haven't tolerated in years. I didn't tolerate it, so last night I put it in a plastic bag. I had to open the bag to turn the pages, but that's the way it goes.

Tonight, the bag seemed kind of annoying, so I took the barely-offgased book out and have been reading it without any trouble. This getting better thing is excellent.

In the spirit of 'naming the feeling,' I feel happy.

still making progress

I suffered a bit a of setback the last couple of days. My husband had an old toe injury that was getting really bothersome, so yesterday he had toe surgery. Toe surgery sounds funny, but it is still stressful, and not just for the guy with the toe injury. I keep practicing being fine in different situations, but husband surgery was a little out of my league.

In my league: buying a little calendar/notebook at Office Depot all by myself. Definitely out of my league: an alarm clock going off at 1:30 am so husband can take his precautionary antibiotic. I don't think I came down off the ceiling for a good half hour after that.

keeping notes on the weirdness

Today I got to go hang out with the really, really sick lady for hours, something I couldn't do two weeks ago. When I got home, I felt myself relax when I hadn't actually done it on purpose. Now, about six hours later, the lymph nodes under my arms hurt. I expect I'm detoxing something, but I could just be getting sick.

Also, I like doing my taxes. Part of it is that I was too sick to work for about half of last year, so I'm getting back a decent amount of the estimated taxes I paid early on. The other part is that I love numbers so much I will even love them if the government orders me to fiddle with them.

I wrote this on Dec 29, and it's time to post it, so here you go

Today I learned that now I can go running in the national park when the air quality is worse than it was two weeks ago, when I was stuck at home with heart palpitations.

So how exactly did this come about? You may recall that a little over a week ago, my friend called and said she was doing a whole lot better having attended a Dynamic Neural Retraining System™ seminar. I thought it sounded like something that would probably help me, too, so I looked into it, by which I mean, read the entire website.

What I took away from that was that when your body sustains some kind of injury, physical or mental, when you start healing, your brain might or might not come back out of fight-or-flight mode. Given a long-term injury, like living in a house with stachybotrys inside the kitchen ceiling for two years, your body could easily have forgotten what calm is. There was a bunch of stuff about what that does to your limbic system, and what I remember it saying was that when you're geared for a fight, you don't bother absorbing nutrients from your food, or sometimes even digesting it very well, your hormones get screwed up, you can't think straight, and you don't do anything with your own personal garbage, e.g. chemicals you inhale. So for the last five years, I've been taking nutritional supplements, and sometimes one to help me digest food, my hormones have been screwed up, I've definitely had 'brain fog' (my best example: I got lost in a drugstore in the summer of 2004), and I have chemical sensitivities.

It sounds like I got stuck in fight-or-flight. So I take a look at the seminar schedule, and there's one in April. Ok, so I need some money for that, but conceivably I could be seriously better by, say, June. Maybe able-to-go-to-the-mall-for-three-hours better.

That kind of revelation is enough to maybe make you relax a little. The 'articles' part of the website also talked about verbalizing how you're feeling because that helps you relax, too. Thus I found that I've been clenching something in my back for probably the last five years, because it kind of hurt when I unclenched it.

It probably didn't hurt that I was going to visit my parents the next day, either, which sounds fun instead of stressful (in my family, anyway), and I really wanted to be enough better that I could tolerate their house, with its kitchen-sink mold and a decorated fir tree in the living room.

So I got in the car at 6:30 am on Tuesday morning with my mask on, and my husband got us across town, and when we got just north of town, it was my turn to drive. Counting the snack break, which isn't technically driving, but I'm taking everything I can get, I drove for six hours. For the last five years, I have been uncomfortable driving, except going from my house to the really, really sick lady's house, which is a grand total of 1.8 miles on lightly-traveled roads. When we got to my parents' house, with a few minor modifications, our room was fine, and so was the kitchen sink. The tree didn't seem to bother me at all, and for the first time, the leather furniture wasn't a problem. I didn't try out the mall or anything challenging, and the worst thing that happened was that at the end of Christmas day, I was pretty worn out. The pie I was stressing over (!) almost didn't even last four hours in a house that usually takes a couple of days to finish a pie. We had to make another one the next day.

The drive home didn't go as well. We wanted to do the drive all in one day again since it worked really well on the way out, but I-5 freaked me out, and I wasn't even driving. There was a lot of traffic and sudden slowing, and by the time we got out the other side of the Los Angeles basin, where it was my turn to drive, it was getting dark, and I was fried. I drove for almost three hours anyway, but it sucked.

Now that we've been home for a few days, I've learned a few more things. My back stopped hurting when I relaxed it after about a week, and I started noticing a spot behind my forehead felt like it was relaxing somehow, too. I can make that happen on demand, but where the website talks about flipping a switch, I end up having to hold the switch. It flips right back to 'tense' if I let go of it, but today I was able to go in a bunch of stores and still hold onto it.

I suppose the ability to let go of the switch and have it stay where you want it to be is something you'd learn at the seminar.

if only I needed one

Today I learned that you can get a 4000 square foot, 5 bedroom house just miles from Arizona State for $172,000. I knew prices had fallen in Phoenix, but an actual example really drives it home.

Update: The house is actually in Maricopa, which isn't near anything. Now I understand the price, and I'm kinda sorry I brought the whole thing up.

banking and getting better

Today I learned that a dying banker has some investment advice for us, but I don't quite feel good enough to figure out exactly what he said. It's probably ok since I don't have any money to invest -- being a sick lady doesn't pay well -- but someday I hope to have a real job.

I hope that because a friend of mine is doing quite a lot better after going to one of these seminars, and it sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. She's now able to go in Home Depot without a mask and not shower immediately upon returning home. I can sort of get away with not showering immediately after going in Safeway, but that's completely different. And she can go to the mall now without the mask, too.

She was the one who, years ago, said that when you start feeling better, and you think you might be able to go to the mall, the mall will put you in your place. It sounds like it doesn't anymore.

I like being able to report on people who are doing better, but you notice it's something different for everybody.