My Journey Home From Chemical Sensitivities

Reader Contribution by Paula Baker-Laporte
Published on April 24, 2013
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It is a privilege to write a blog for Mother Earth and to share my area of expertise with you in the hope that it will enhance your health. By way of introduction I will begin by describing the journey that has led me to specialize in the design of healthy homes and workplaces.  This path began in 1972 when I happened upon the University of Toronto, School of Architecture, almost by chance, with a good handle on math, a love of art and very little understanding of architecture. There I began a life-long inquiry into what makes space beautiful and good.

Fast forward to 1992: I was a practicing architect in Santa Fe NM and was struggling with a mysterious chronic illness that had remained undiagnosed for years, even though I had seen many doctors. Finally my new doctor, Erica Elliott, discovered what was wrong with me. Unfortunately, this information was as a result of a shocking discovery about her own health; she too was troubled by a constellation of disabling symptoms that eluded diagnosis by her colleagues.

Although the particular array of symptoms was quite different for each of us she perceived that they both had the same root cause: chemical over-exposure had made us hyper-sensitive. Subsequent testing proved her theory to be correct. A person with multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), as the condition is called, becomes symptomatic at very low levels of exposure to a wide variety of toxins, allergens and even electromagnetic fields commonly found in our modern world. My symptoms included fatigue, frequent respiratory infection, hyper-sensitivity to certain odors, muscular pain, and increased food and pollen allergies.

Aside from not feeling well most of the time, the more monumental realization was that, as an architect who frequented homes under construction, I was constantly being exposed to, and made sick by, the thousands of products and building materials used in new home construction that emitted toxic chemicals. I reasoned that if these chemicals were so devastating for me then they must not be very good for anyone else who gets exposed to them including the factory workers where these products were produced, the contractors who installed them and the future inhabitants.

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