Monday, May 25, 2009

Riding out an exposure: PERFUMES ARE POISON

There is bliss and then there is a blast ... perfumes are one of the worst. I am coming through an episode that just reinforces the need to be resilient. A visitor came to call on our friends who share their space and their home. The visitor 'knew' of my sensitivities but forgot to come fragrance free. It's a lesson that costs me time, health and recuperation. My organs collect the chemicals and I suffer through the process. Sleep my most valuable ally, prayers right in there with the rest.

My friends are learning what happens ... they see it, we cancel our Sunday community dinner and Jane E. the dog who loves the visitor got another bath to try to rid her of the perfume and for a while I will need to limit my entry into the Big House. It takes a lot to educate and be educated.

Here's something to remind me, and our visitors what perfumes are REALLY...

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) is basically a subset of Environmental Illness (EI), which is caused by living in a toxic world. The chemicals that were synthesized after World War II (including, pesticides, synthetic fragrances, cleaning products, detergents, etc.) are mostly "petro-chemicals" (petroleum based) and are quite toxic to humans. There have been virtually no studies done on the majority of these chemicals to see how they affect humans - the industry just placed the chemicals in the environment with the assumption that they are "safe, till proven toxic", instead of the other way around. *
One of the biggest offenders is PERFUME and other scented products. Did you know that many of the ingredients in your perfume are the exact same ingredients found in GASOLINE??!! I didn't either! The scary thing is that the perfume industry is NOT REGULATED at all - they can put any number of chemicals in fragrance without revealing what those chemicals are - or how they affect humans. We humans are all participating in a giant "lab experiment" against our knowledge and against our will, and it's making some of us VERY sick.

-an excerpt from Our Little Place

*fortunately there are some excellent resources and study being done to document the poisoning affect of these chemicals. One of those recent studies is now being posted over on Susie Collins' Canary Report ... it's one fully loaded project researched and published by Professor Anne Steineman and Amy L. Davis. Amy is one of our MCS friends who lives in Seattle.
from The Ledge and happy to be coming out of the brain fog and perfume poisoning, Mokihana
Smell a flower, leave the perfume alone, very alone.

2 comments:

Susie Collins said...

Thanks for the shout out, Mokihana! I didn't realize Amy was close to you, what a small world. Anne's work is so important for us MCSers, she's really helping us make our case on MCS.

I'm so sorry you were exposed to perfumes that made you so sick. I've had the same thing happen with visitors, and it gets into things like fabrics and door handles. Horrible when your own private space gets contaminated! Hope you are all recovered. xoxo

(PS You might want to double check the two links, I don't think they are going to the right pages.)

Mokihana Calizar said...

Thanks Susie,
The My Little Place link has been corrected ... what a lesson in making sure you get the details right. I'm working on the other.

Sorry folks for the distraction, if you tried to link to it before you were surprised. The real MCS page to perfumes etc. is there for you.

Brain fog can account for much of my confusion, and then I've got to admit mistakes happen because I'm human, too.