How many times have we heard it’s “only a little fragrance”?
Telling a person with MCS/ES that there is “only a little fragrance”
is like
telling someone with Celiac Disease that there’s “only a little gluten”
or
telling someone with a peanut allergy that there’s “only a little peanut”
or
telling someone who uses a wheelchair that there are “only a few steps”.
It’s not ok.
It’s NOT ok.
Individual images follow: Continue reading
Posted in Accessibility, Air Quality, Chemicals, Disability, Environmental Health, Fragrance, Images, MCS/ES
Tagged access, accommodation, allergies, asthma, barriers, barriers to access, celiac, environmental sensitivities, essential oils, Food, gluten, health, MCS, multiple chemical sensitivities, peanuts, sensitivities, wheelchair
Press Release from National Center for Environmental Health Strategies
~ Mary Lamielle
… excerpts …
National Council on Disability Transportation Report Addresses Chemical and Electrical Sensitivities; Recommends Changes in Policies and Practices to Improve Access
Mimi from Ontario, Canada has this to say to us:
I wish that you could accept that this is real and that your habits make me ill.
I wish you could understand how switching to fragrance-free products is such a small act that means a world of difference to me – literally.
It means being able to have a clear mind in order to work effectively and support myself, it means being able to receive hugs, it means not suffering every day.
♥
Posted in Accessibility, Disability, Education, Fragrance, MCS/ES, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Support
Tagged fragrance-free, hugs, MCS, Products, think clearly, work
For your information, here are scans of the MCS brochure from the Environmental Health Clinic at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. Note that they see mostly patients with milder to middling MCS/ES (and there’s usually a 6-12 month wait list), as those with more severe MCS/ES are unable to access the clinic, it being in a regular hospital with hand sanitizers, hundreds of toxic people and plenty of unsafe materials everywhere.
The brochure is an introduction, and reducing exposures is always a good thing, but sometimes people with MCS/ES need to eliminate exposures to remain at all functional, and that’s where things become a lot more complicated, and why we need the OCEEH.
Some of us have gone to great lengths to encourage others to use fragrance-free products, especially for laundry, as many of the chemicals in fragrances cause such disabling effects for us.
Not only that, but fragranced laundry products pollute entire neighbourhoods with hazardous chemicals when pumped out of dryer vents (which were designed to emit moisture, not toxic chemicals), meaning that we (and others with asthma, migraines, COPD, etc) can’t sit or work outside in our gardens, open our windows for fresh air, or go for walks safely when other people are doing laundry with regular commercial products (and when are they not?), because we could be felled at any time from the emissions.
Much to our chagrin, many of us have discovered that some fragrance-free products can also make us dizzy, cause breathing difficulties like asthma, create cognitive confusion and memory problems, give us headaches, chemical hangovers, and more.
This has caused all kinds of difficulties, not just for us, but for the people who switched products only to discover that their efforts were not “good enough” for us.
“Can’t they EVER be happy? Why are they still complaining?”
Anne Steinemann’s recently published research regarding VOCs emitted from regular personal care, cleaning, and laundry products, (the popular ones used by most people in the “developed” world) sheds some much needed light on the problems.
So what did she find?
Posted in Air Quality, Chemicals, Environment, Health, MCS/ES, Pollution, Public Health
Tagged allergies, asthma, carcinogens, chemical pollution, chemicals in laundry products, cleaning, confusion, dizziness, essential oils, fire hazard, fragrance-free, green, hazardous air pollutants, headaches, laundry, non-toxic, Products, rashes, toxic
∴
Wendy is NOT a widget. Widgets can go anywhere. Wendy can’t.
“Widget” is used in texts and speech, especially in the context of accounting, to indicate a hypothetical “any-product”. Companies in such texts will frequently be given names such as “ABC Widgets” or “Acme Widget Corp.” to indicate that the particular business of the hypothetical company is not relevant to the topic of discussion.
(Widget economics – wikipedia)
“Economists often use the term widget to refer to an abstract unit of production.”
∴
Wendy is NOT a widget as her local housing authority seems to believe. They have a capacity problem, but instead of addressing the need for improved (and accessible) capacity, they want to re-arrange people’s lives as if they were widgets, with little to no regard or understanding of the consequences.
∴
INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS ‘Capacity’
“The widget manufacturer may be able to produce 150,000 widgets in a month. However, due to downtime because of equipment maintenance and worker illness, only about 130,000 widgets can actually be produced per month. Over the long run, a business can increase its capacity and output by acquiring more factors of productions. For example, if market demand for widgets spikes, the widget manufacturer can buy more equipment and hire more workers, and thus increase its capacity to 175,000 widgets per month.”
∴
Wendy is not a widget. She is a living, breathing, human being, a human being with a complex, chronic environmentally linked condition and disability related needs, needs that widgets don’t have.
Wendy Kearly photo by ADAM MACINNIS – THE NEWS
The housing authority from which Wendy rents her safe home has deemed her over-housed, and are in the process of evicting her, despite the fact that Wendy has no other option for medically required, safe housing available, and no safe access to any of the other places most people take for granted (see below).
In the following audio interview with Wendy, among other things, she talks about the process her grown children take to detox themselves enough to be able to safely visit with her, so that she is able to safely hug them when they come to town.
∴
Recognition Inclusion and Equity is the name of the new website for the OCEEH. Their comprehensive reports and other information about this much needed project can all be found there now. Please check it out and also “like” their facebook page if you are on facebook.
Why? From their website:
MISSION
Our overarching goal is to achieve ‘recognition, inclusion and equity’ for people living with the often painful and disabling conditions of ES/MCS (environmental sensitivities/multiple chemical sensitivity), ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome) and FM (fibromyalgia).
At present, more than 568,000 patients with these conditions lack the normal rights, benefits, policies, programs and facilities that Ontario makes available to those with conditions of comparable severity and prevalence. …
What if you had the chance to say one thing about your life with MCS/ES, and how it would change your life if it was understood?
May is MCS/ES Awareness Month (yet again… maybe some year we won’t need it to be, but this year, we still do), and this year, I would like to share some of your stories and insights.
If you could tell the world ONE thing about your life with MCS/ES (or any other invisible disability that has MCS/ES as a symptom), what would it be?
How has this one thing affected your life?
If this one thing were changed, how would your life be different?
You could think of it as a conversation with someone you love, someone who loves you (or even a kind stranger), someone who wants to understand, and who is willing to do something for you, and/or to change the way they do things, in order to include you in life, and to help you with what you need or want to accomplish in life (for example).
This is your time to tell them this one thing, and how this change will impact your life for the better.
Here’s what I am asking for with your submissions: Continue reading
Posted in Accessibility, Action, Change, Disability, Environmental Health, Environmental Sensitivities, MCS/ES, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, Support
Tagged accessibility, advocacy, allergies, autism, communication, community, education, family, fibromyalgia, friends, heart to heart, invisible disabilities, MCS, MCS/ES, ME/CFS, sensitivities, writing
 | linda @ Seriously "S… on MCS/ES |
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 | Tabatha Schnorr on MCS/ES |
| Tabatha Schnorr on The CDC and MCS |
| linda @ Seriously "S… on MCS and Housing |
| linda @ Seriously "S… on Hospital Protocols for People… |
Seriously "Sensitive" to Pollution 