Stories on how nasty people can be towards the environmentally ill

Stories on how nasty regular people can be toward the environmentally ill

Once people know your vulnerability, they may choose to harass you, or act clueless.

Keywords: harassment, psychopaths, multiple chemical sensitivity, MCS

Dryer sheets

Dryer sheets are popular in North America, and not really used elsewhere. They are added to the wet clothes in the clothes dryer, where the heat makes them give off chemicals that coat the clothes with fabric softeners and fragrances. They also make the dryer exhaust very toxic.

A man lived in a town house (row house). His next door neighbor used dryer sheets, so he could not be in his yard when the neighbor ran her clothes dryer. He tried to talk to the neighbor about it, but it had the opposite effect. Incensed by his “criticism” she now made sure to run the clothes dryer, with a dryer sheet in it, whenever she saw him out in his yard.

He eventually had to sell his house and move away.

Newly painted

We had been friends for nearly twenty years. Then I got MCS. It slowly got worse, and the doctors were not helpful. He was the only one I confided in, but he just trivialized it.

We got together each year at Thanksgiving. He lived in Chicago, several hours away, and had just gotten married. I had no trouble in their house, but then they told me this year we would go to her brother’s house.

When we got there, the whole house smelled wonderfully of the food cooking. After half an hour I started to get dizzy, but the food was coming and that usually helps, as it did.

About two hours after we ate, I got dizzy again, so bad I had to go for a walk until it was time to leave.

On the way back they told me the house had just been painted the week before, but they figured if they didn’t tell me it would not bother me. Obviously it did, but my friend still would not believe me. Our long friendship died the following year.

The door blistered

A friend lived in a corridor apartment in New York. The air was so still in the shared corridor that the smell of other people’s fragrances lingered for a long time after they had walked through.

She noticed her next-door neighbor left a particular toxic scent trail.

One day she walked in behind her neighbor and tried to talk to her, telling her that the strong fragrances were a real problem. That did not go over well.

The next morning when my friend opened her front door, it was soaked with fragrances. It was so strong she immediately had to close the door again and call friends for help. She was trapped in her apartment.

The harasser had used so much stuff that the solvents in it peeled the paint off the door. It was blistering.

The friends arrived with strong cleaning agents and were able to get most of the chemicals off the door.

The poor woman had to move as soon as her lease was up. She ended up moving to rural Tennessee.

The fragranced desk

JR was a schoolteacher in California. When the school was renovated, she got MCS from the toxic materials. She was able to continue working by asking her kids to refrain from using fragrances.

One day she entered her classroom, someone had soaked her desk with fragrances. It was terrible, and immediately affected her so she lost her common sense. A schoolteacher is trained to never leave the kids on their own, which was so ingrained in her that she did not leave the room. She was so incapacitated she didn’t think of sending a kid to the principal’s office with a request to be relieved.

Instead, she stayed for the entire lesson, though she was not sure how she got through it or what she actually taught the kids.

This ordeal made her MCS so much worse she was never able to return to work. She had to go on disability.

Withholding a safe house

The safest MCS houses are those that are built from the ground up with non-toxic materials. But there are not many of those built, so they are a treasure.

A woman with MCS had built such a house in Arizona. When she died of breast cancer, the house was inherited by her sister, who lived on the opposite side of the country.

Since it was such a good house, the local EI community wanted to make sure the house was sold to someone else with the illness. They tried to contact the sister to offer their help selling it, but were ignored.

They kept a sharp eye out for when the house was offered for sale. They discovered it was simply placed on the regular market, and not advertised in any MCS newsletter. They immediately reposted the information through the EI media.

A woman with MCS drove all the way from Georgia to Arizona to look at it. She decided to buy.

Unfortunately, two regular people also liked the house. The realtor told them to submit secret bids.

The woman from Georgia was determined to buy the house, so she made sure to submit a high bid. She also asked the realtor to let the sister know she had MCS and really needed that house. At no time did she actually try to contact the sister directly, so they did not know each other.

She did indeed submit the highest bid, but the sister refused to sell her the house. Instead, she accepted the lower offer from one of the regular people. The realtor said he had never seen that happen before.

The sister obviously had some sort of animosity towards people with the illness, even people she didn’t know.

The smoky grill

I lived upstairs in a two-story apartment building. I chose it because it was up against some woods for fresh air. It was the best apartment I could find and it was pretty good, though I had to keep the windows cracked open year round to not get headaches. In the summer I kept them wide open all day.

Then a new neighbor moved in downstairs. She placed a big grill on her patio and used it at least three times a week. It was always cheap greasy meat that smoked terribly, with the smoke coming into my apartment. There was a wall enclosing her patio and my balcony on one side, which concentrated the smoke.

I tried to talk to her about it, but she was completely dismissive of the problem.

I always had to be alert for her coming onto her patio so I could close the windows before the smoke started.

When my lease was up for renewal six months later, I got another apartment just two doors down. When I moved my stuff she came out and asked if I moved because of her. I just answered “yes” and walked away.

The new colleague smoked

Back when it was still legal to smoke at work, I shared an office with four other people. None of us smoked, but then we got a new man who started smoking at his desk.

I asked the boss for help and he said he didn’t like it either. The new man was told to smoke out in the hallway. He never forgave me. For the next year, until I quit, he let me know each day how he resented it. Typically, he would come back in, while still smoking his cigarette, making a detour past my desk, with this big smirk, before stubbing out at his desk. Or maybe “forgetting” to stub it out.

Eleven years after I left, I came back to visit my old boss. The smoker was still there and his resentment had clearly not lessened over the years. Get between a man and his addictions at your peril.

Doubting Daddy

A woman was so sick with MCS she was unable to find housing that didn’t make her sick, so she had to live in a detoxed van. Her dad absolutely refused to accept his daughter’s illness, and “tested” her several times when she visited her parents.

They live in a rural area and he regularly burns their trash. One morning when she was visiting and still sleeping in her van, he came out with some trash, including some leftover paint. He placed it right next to the van and burned it.

She had a lot of food allergies and liked to eat wild foods, such as dandelions. Her dad knew about that, so one time he sprayed his lawn with pesticides to get rid of the many dandelions, he then plucked a bunch of these freshly-pesticided dandelions and offered them for her to eat.

Rebellious teenager

A high school teenager rants about his dad on social media. This in response to a 2016 video posted by The Guardian about people with MCS and EHS in Snowflake, Arizona:

My dad is convinced he is allergic to wifi, I haven’t had wifi in my house for 2-3 years now. He stopped working for a couple of months and we are always restricted on what we can do as a family (no hotels, no public places with wifi and no visiting family). It’s funny to watch these people until you have someone in your life who is as crazy as them. Everywhere we go he “educates” people on his “disease.” Luckily next year i’m off to college. Things like this is indeed hard to live with but not for them, for the people around them. edit. I forgot to mention he also thinks he is allergic to electricity, so he turns off our electricity during the night including the fridges and freezer.

A commenter suggests:

Set up a router without him knowing record it.. put something electric under his sheet a flat led panel or just put the router under his bed for a week then reveal it may hurt him and in turn hurt you but in the long run it will be worth it.

The teenager responds:

Wouldn’t work he has 2 Emeters that he uses daily and walks around with in the house, sometimes he wakes me up in the middle of the night because he measures something coming from my room. He is to far gone.

If the teenager didn’t rebel by leaving on his portable electronics, his dad wouldn’t have to sweep the house every day. And it doesn’t occur to him the reason dad gets up at night is because his son’s gadgets disturb his sleep, hence he goes looking for the cause.

The social media postings are quoted verbatim and in full. They were made on YouTube sometime in September, 2018.

The offensive sticker

I was very glad to receive the “Fragrance free home” sticker included with your last newsletter.

Happily, I walked out and attached it to my front door, but that upset my neighbor and friend of many years, who mows my lawn.

He said, “I will [expletive deleted] be allowed to use my deodorant, and I don’t want to smell like a pig!”

I became so perturbed that I tried to remove the sticker again, but I gathered myself and told him that the purpose of the label was to state that my home was fragrance free. I do not use perfume, fabric softener, or other scented products, since they make me sick and my daughter has severe MCS, and he should not decide what I put on my door, though I could not prohibit him from using a deodorant or other things.

This made no difference. He just repeated his angry outburst. So the result is that a long friendship is over.

I have since gotten new stickers which now sit on my door.

Source: MCSinfo, November 2013. A publication of the Danish MCS support group.