2004 - Vol. 1, Issue 9

"I'm telling you, I've gone 'round the bend."

My friend, Carin, is agitated. It seems she caught herself punching a toll-free number on the microwave keypad the other day. I put on a face of concern. "Did you hear three tones, then, 'The number you have dialed is no longer in service. The new number is...'?"

"No." She is still frowning but there is a smile knocking at the back of her eyes, working on her mouth.

"Allrighty, then, no need to panic," I declare.

The smile steps forward. "At least not yet," she offers.

"Right! And by then you'll be too out of it to know it!" I bellow, my arms thrust wide, palms up, eyebrows raised. By now we are both laughing. We launch into a game of "Can You Top This?" starting with our friend, Betsy, who, after scouring the house for hours, finally found her mobile phone in the freezer. Carin shakes her head.

"Can you imagine, not being able to make a call? What if there had been an emergency?"

"Well, there's always the microwave," I point out.

Recently, I caught myself in a conversation with a can of organic chicken broth at the supermarket. I was asking it why it had to contain gluten. I am not a think-aloud-to-yourself kind of person. At least I didn't think so. It was a sidelong glance from a potato chip stock clerk a few feet away that jolted me to awareness. Thankfully, there was no time for embarrassment, as no sooner had I replaced the can on the shelf than I overheard a woman talking to a can of chickpeas a few yards away. I don't know if the garbanzos were responding, but she seemed to want to know if they'd be good in a minestrone soup. I caught her eye and nodded knowingly.

I don't recall talking to non-perishables before multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) moved in on me. I would like to think that with the departure of MCS these odd, foggy habits will go too, but who's to say? Is this simply a function of age, of the shedding of inhibition, of preoccupation, of an overloaded mind? It could be heredity. I clearly recall the day my mother returned from doing errands to what she thought was an empty house. From my room, where I was doing homework, I overheard her say, "You should have seen what I saw at the supermarket today."

"Mom?" I called from my room, startling her. "Who are you talking to?"

"Ohhhh, my-s-e-e-elf," came the sing-song reply.

At the time that answer was a bit alarming, but I now believe that she was just distracted and overworked. The mind needs a rest. It needs normalcy. It needs to socialize, not scrutinize. This is the "too-much-on-our-plate" spaciness syndrome, not to be confused with the "brain fog" that characterizes MCS, which, when it first happens, is a frightening thing indeed.

It was my third year of working in a chemical manufacturing plant. Although I had ached from head to toe from my first week there, I struck it up to the stress of working 80-hour weeks, and of simply needing a vacation. But now the brain fog piece of MCS had set in. Once a fluid speaker and thinker, I now frequently hesitated, searching for simple words, and in the process, lost track of my original thought. I felt fragmented and disoriented, as if my mind were a broken string of pearls, thoughts scattered everywhere, lost.

Finally, on a day after many weeks of not being able to remember the names of many of my longtime colleagues, I felt a sudden panic of realization bubble up inside of me: that cold, sliding feeling that something was terribly wrong. Within six months, my capacity to move and think abandoned me altogether and I stopped working. I had no idea what was wrong with me.

Now, after nine years of detoxification, I have managed to recover some of my verbal skills and mobility, but I am not done. While there are moments of clarity these days, that clarity can just as easily desert me with a walk down the detergent aisle of the supermarket or inside two minutes in a waiting room with a perfumed patient.

Unlike Carin's microwave episode, MCS-related "brain fog" is not funny; in fact, it can be downright devastating. Take, for example, the time the urgent need to use a public rest room arose en route to the supermarket. Fortunately, it was off-season, so I knew, as I pulled into the parking lot of a local tourist site, there would be no wait for a stall. What I did not bank on was the potency of the room's air deodorizer and its impact on me. Clutching my mask to my face with one hand and fumbling with my jeans with the other, my exposure was dangerously long. Once outside, I drew a big breath of relief. So far, so good - I found my car! (Well, OK, it was the only one in the lot, but still!) But once inside, I discovered I could not remember how to drive my ten-year-old manual Honda. The gauges seemed foreign, the gearshift, with its imprinted 1-2-3-4-5-R, meaningless.

In these cases, the first impulse is often to cry. Instead, I waited. Opening all the windows, breathing and waiting, I watched 30 minutes pass. Finally, it came back to me. Now exhausted, I proceeded to the market. But although I had a list, I missed half the items on it. In my foggy brain, the words on it did not match the items on the shelves. And afterwards, the search for the car in the uncrowded lot was a twenty-minute ordeal.

Now, that is brain fog. It is frightening, it is incapacitating, it is paralyzing. When I am there, I forget how to laugh.

Still, the world even without brain fog is ludicrous. Jay Leno asks brand new college graduates at their commencement how many moons the Earth has and they argue they can't remember because they "haven't had astronomy since freshman year." The National Forest Service receives in its suggestion box the complaint that "there aren't enough signs on the unmarked trails." My mother encounters a neighbor in the market who inquires into my father's activities since his retirement. "He's a volunteer at the radio station for the blind," she offers, adding proudly, "he reads the evening news."

"Oh, yes," the neighbor nods, knowingly, "large print." Eyes wide, my mother forces an overbright smile and nods wildly.

Chronic illness forces you to compensate in ways that might appear odd to the outside world. Let's return to Carin, who has chronic fatigue syndrome. She has taken to driving to her mailbox every day. What's wrong with that, you ask? After all, you drive to the post office and there's nothing wrong with you. Did I mention that her mailbox is at the end of her driveway, which is eight yards long? She rationalizes that she doesn't want the neighbors to see her still in her bathrobe in the afternoon, so she backs out of the garage and grabs the mail from the car.

"But won't the neighbors think you strange for driving to the mailbox, then back into the garage every day?" I suggest.

"Better strange than lazy," she shrugs. "And hey - at least I'm not arguing with soup!"

I wasn't arguing so I let that one slide. In my own defense, I believe I come from a long line of folks who carry on conversations with inanimate objects. And it's not always our fault. Back to my mother: I distinctly remember, when my brother was three and I was two, my mother telling a fire hydrant to "come in out of the cold - you look frozen stiff." There was a reasonable explanation: she had misplaced her glasses and "felt" her way outside to enlist her little ones to find them for her. We were dressed in red and gray snowsuits and wide-brimmed red hats with ear flaps and a big button on top. The snow was deep and drifty. To a myopic, stressed-out mom, a fire hydrant could easily pass for one of us. She just couldn't see, but the neighbors who witnessed this exchanged a concerned look that I remember to this day.

In simpler, saner times, my mother stood out, but today the world really is too preoccupied to notice her. It seems we have collectively lost our ability to think. Like a computer that's been issued too many commands, minds everywhere have frozen up; like the cursor on the screen, we are blinking but immobile. Chronic illness, especially MCS, has a way of making you feel like a social outcast and an intellectual misfit. But even MCS-free folks are acting weird, not thinking.

When I count my blessings, I count among them the fact that I can now remember a reasonable number of names, at least of the people I like, and that more than half the time I can piece together a coherent sentence. And I have not forgotten how to operate a car since the last time I was fool enough to sit in a garage trying to get an inspection sticker. And for the record, I do know how many moons the Earth has, even on a bad day. And most days, I can remember how to laugh. These things are worth celebrating. As for the craziness, I say so what if Carin nukes toll-free numbers, Betsy freezes phones and I chat up soup? My mom would be proud. I'll take your run-of-the-mill distraction over brain fog any day. It's nice to fit in for a change.

"Going 'Round the Bend with MCS" first appeared in MACI News, January 2000. Copyright ©2000 by Petra Breen. Reprinted by permission of the author.