Multiple Chemical Sensitivities...It's No Joke and It's Not Just In Your Head!

Me Reacting to ??

 

Here I was sitting at my desk at home, minding my own business when I got a whiff of a very familiar scent.  We live fairly close to the highway and cars pass by all the time.  I recognized the scent as that orange antibacterial aerosol spray, (yea, you all know the one I'm talking about...) when I felt my face go all numb, then tingling, then pinpricks of pain, and then the nausea and the feeling that someone had just buried a hatchet in to your forehead.  The first picture was when I started reacting.  I was at home alone and I figured if this was it, the one that sent me over the edge, at least then my husband could know what it was that had happened to me.  The second picture is about 15 minutes after the exposure to the scent.  Imagine that, just sitting at home, inside your house, and you have to worry about these kinds of things.

  What do you do when you have told friends that you cannot 'tolerate' certain things which they think "It's all in your head," or take some kind of perverse delight in torturing you more because you have finally had enough and are trying to help others understand the issue and they just cannot believe that their scent would do this to you. 

 

Or better yet, imagine finally getting a chance to 'train' on the job and the company uses the heavily scented bathroom fresheners aside from having a no scent policy and the heavy scent of perfume is strongly in the air.  The job is already difficult enough as is and now, you have to try to wade through the brain fog of confusion as your body is just trying to keep you alive and kicking.  The nausea, the pain, the never-ending pain of a headache from Hell.  Not to mention you just don't want everyone to see you throw-up as you are looking for the closest garbage can to run to because you don't think you can make it to the restroom. 

 

Or, try this one, a co-worker who knows that you react to the above-mentioned orange antibacterial spray; has seen you go in to the ever not-so-lovely gagging asthmatic cough and still decides that they must layer the air heavily with this stuff.  So you get to work feeling good when - WHAM BAM, THANK YOU MA'AM, you now get a splitting headache within 15 minutes of arriving at work; trying to look through bleary-eyed, goopy mucus your eyes have created trying to flush this toxic exposure out of your body. Thus making it very difficult to see much less try to concentrate on your computer screen which you must be able to see to do your job.  Please, we all know the kind of pain that happens when blurry vision, headache and confusion are making you tense up even more so now that the reactive headache has turned in to a tension migraine. 

 

Educate yourself and please be kind to people who say these things make them sick.  They are not lying.  They are not making it up and it most certainly is more than just in their brains.