An Allergy to ‘Everything’ Stirs Crusade
After years of searching, Mary Lamielle figured out what was making her so miserably, dramatically sick. It was the world.
Lamielle, who lives in Voorhees, is chemically sensitive, a condition that is not recognized by the medical Establishment or the insurance industry but that sufferers say can be debilitating.
She founded and leads the National Center for Environmental Health Strategies, a 2,000-member organization working to win recognition and help for victims. For herself, she struggles with an isolation forced by the nausea, vertigo and breathing difficulties she said will occur if she subjects herself to perfume, gasoline vapors, even her new car.
Her crusade began six years ago, with the belief that her worsening illness had something to do with malfunctions at the nearby sewage treatment plant, exhaust from idling diesel trucks at the local chicken processing plant and other things around her.
“The property around us was just unbearable,” Lamielle said. “So my own involvement became a way of self-protection.”
Her husband has presented her testimony in Washington--illness keeps her from doing it--while she struggled with the neighbors’ pesticides and the plastics that prevent her from riding in the family’s new car.
Lamielle, 38, remembers having a heightened sensitivity to chemicals even as a girl. Exposure to formaldehyde during a frog dissection exercise caused burning in her lungs and her first sinus infection.
Sinus problems and migraine headaches became more frequent, and normal life increasingly difficult. She was forced, in 1980, to leave her job as a contract specialist with the Navy.
Even a residue of certain perfumes “makes me feel disoriented during the time, but an hour later makes me start retching,” she said. “That goes on for hours afterwards.”
If she gets too close to the neighbors’ lawn, she can’t see properly, she trembles and her heart beats irregularly. Visitors have to be careful not to style their hair with mousse or wear clothes fresh from the dry cleaners.
Worry about the formaldehyde in new furniture has prevented her and her husband from replacing the worn-out couch.
Sometimes she wears an oxygen mask--ceramic because of the chemicals in plastic ones. About once a year, she ventures into a department store.
The tools of an activist’s home office are out of the question. Lamielle writes on a manual typewriter rather than a computer, and she arranges with a nearby print shop to send her materials out.
Though insurers and doctors often dismiss chemical sensitivity as psychosomatic, Lamielle said she is encouraged by a gradual acceptance.
“The tables have switched,” she said. “Today there is a consciousness that indeed you can get sick from lawn-care chemicals, from carpeting being installed.”