Still thinking about staying longer in New Mexico...
The morning after my return to more-toxic-land, after R. made shrimp & grits for breakfast, I set out to see P., the tent-making MCS woman from S.’ footage, who rented a room in her home, up the mountain from Albuquerque. She had been seriously ill for many years, and I hoped her home might be ok for me. Prejudiced by her mention of a Section 8 voucher, I’d imagined her place rundown and uncomfortable in a bad section of town. But in fact, when I looked at the map, I saw it was up the old, touristy road on the way to Santa Fe, tucked behind the mountains, safe from the pollution of the city, where the air comes across the Plains. No agriculture, no nuclear research facilities, just mountain air. And trees. After the desert landscape around Santa Fe, I was thrilled to have the smell and shelter and oxygen of pine trees around. The forest felt protective and safe after all that open land.
It’s been ten years since S. filmed P., and she’s aged since then, gained weight. But her voice was familiar, and looking closely, so was her face, though now framed by gray. She was having a yard sale, she’d told me. This meant that she’d set out a rack of tie-dyed shirts, socks and sheets, and piled miscellaneous leftover objects in her driveway. Ratty furniture, old appliances. Looking closely, there was some intriguing camping gear – a foldout plastic picnic table I’d only seen before at Tanglewood and a good bike. A few folks stopped by, turned over some baskets, leafed through the tie-dye, grumbled quietly and drove off. One old man with a face-wrenching eye twitch and a red plaid shirt was looking for wagon wheels, for yard decoration. Not only did he ask Patrice, repeatedly, if she had any, but he asked all the other shoppers too. Including me. Nothing, we all told him, sorry. Disappointed, he twitched one eye, nodded to everyone, piled his wife into his pickup and headed down the mountain.
During a lull between customers, P. showed me around the house. It’s mostly made of wood, upstairs & downstairs, spacious, a little messy, and unlike S.’ house, not covered in foil or any other obvious signs of an MCS inhabitant. She also has no rules about showering or washing, just that we check our soap & shampoo with her for fragrance reaction.
She’s figured out the ventilation –a ceiling fan upstairs and a window fan in the bathroom sends the air across the floor and out. In the summer, she says, she gets some off-gassing from the formaldehyde wallboard and the pergo floor, but in winter, it stays cool enough. She suggested we might want to cover the floor with plastic, then rugs, just in case. I sat in the room awhile to test it, under the open window. The air up there is incredibly clean. It’s high up too, at 6500 feet, but the altitude didn’t seem to have the same dizzying effect, or maybe I was finally used to it.
She also showed me her tent sites in the yard, that she uses sometimes when the toxic load from the city just gets too much. She has layers of tarps for protection – and a frightening story about a huge branch that fell one night on her tent, when she had decided she was too tired to sleep in it and had to stay inside.
P. is an incredible example of someone who has chosen to live her life instead of hide from it. She hated being 'strange,' as she calls it, living outside the world, in tents for so long. Now she is in school studying public health and working two or three jobs –caring for senior citizens, teaching water aerobics and working as an anti-smoking advocate at UNM. She goes into the city every day, and sometimes she spends the night at a friend's house, which actually means camping in her yard and using the kitchen and bathroom.
It's hard to do justice to P. She's very kind, but very controlling. There's a connection I've noticed between MCS'ers and 12-step. Some deep psychological thing about boundaries is at work, as if people who spend their lives without boundaries literally take too much in and it somehow destroys them, forcing them declare their needs, finally, when they have no choice, when not speaking of them will cause physical symptoms. Do I fall into this category? I wonder. I am suspicious of 12-step and self-help. I can only find life lessons in literature, emotional succor in music. The words have to be strong, the feelings powerful; a set of slogans is too foreign for me.
2 comments:
What did you mean about the connection between boundaries, 12 step, and MCS? I'd be interested to hear more of your observations, since you seem to be rather balanced and quite clear in explaining nuance.
I too find some psychological similarities in some people (and perhaps myself) but I wonder if some of it is created by the condition, rather than causing it.
I, too, am interested to hear more of your thoughts about this.
The thing that comes to my mind is how common it is for people with addictions to have had major trauma in their life (often childhood). Dr. Martin Pall's research shows how MCS, CFS and FM are very often comorbid with PTSD.
I know that for me, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) came *before* addictions and before MCS. Dr. Pall's research shows how much of the same messed up brain chemistry stuff going on with MCS also happens with PTSD.
That's the scientific side.
But I'm really intrigued by the thing you mentioned about boundaries.
That fits perfectly with my life - terrible at boundaries and didn't implement almost any until I became so debilitatingly sick with MCS that it became necessary.
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