While there are hospitals in Canada especially for patients who suffer environmental illnesses, I know of only one place in the United States which tries to treat MCS. That is in Texas.
If you think the MCS sufferer simply doesn't like your perfume, or can take an allergy pill, that is not true. The fact is the perfume makes her sick. I loved my husband's aftershave which he wore the first ten years we were married. But when I became sensitive to artificial fragrances and became ill from being around them, he was most agreeable to leaving it off. He watched me suffer with asthma like attacks, excruciating headaches, extreme fatigue and depression after being exposed to chemicals we use in our daily lives, petroleum based fragrances which simulate the odor of flowers, and other created fragrances used in almost everything we buy today.
He became my biggest advocate, especially when he was in the hospital, and the staff came into his room wearing fragrance, or when they tried to clean his room with toxic cleaners.
We put a sign on his door asking that no one come in the room wearing fragrance. This was at Emory Hospital where people are supposed to know how to care for sick people. The nurses did not wear fragrance, but the others on the staff did not understand and did not seem to care that I had to wear a mask in the hallway or why we insisted on clean air in the room. I was the canary in the coal mine. If the toxic scents closed up my breathing tubes, it was also damaging to my husband whose immune system had been destroyed by chemo and all the other things his body had ingested over the month he was there.
More and more people are speaking out and trying to make this problem known. I hope you will help by sending this blog post to others, by sharing it on social media and talking about it to your friends.
You can read a post by a blogger who tells her story of coping with MCS.
Do you know of anyone who deals with this illness? How do you and others try to help?
