The Sensitives: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America's Last Pure Place - Hardcover

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Oliver Broudy is a freelance journalist living in western Massachusetts. He has written for Men’s Health, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and many other publications. His work has taken him to China, Afghanistan, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He has written about pop stars, sports stars, kung-fu, anarchy, and lots of weird medical conditions. He’s been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and his Amazon singles have twice been named best single of the year.

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Chapter 1: The Disappearance of Brian Welsh

CHAPTER 1 The Disappearance of Brian Welsh

Brian Welsh was not acclaimed in any of the usual ways. He was no football star or academic prodigy. He was no senator’s son. In fact his dad was a verbally abusive factory worker who, thankfully perhaps, died young from emphysema.

Growing up in Michigan, Brian was well liked by his peers, one of those good-natured extroverts for whom clowning and raillery came easy. After high school, he studied journalism at the local community college, drove a forklift at a lumberyard to pay the bills, and eventually got married. When the lumberyard job disappeared he trained to become a respiratory therapist. For a boy from Muskegon, life wasn’t looking half-bad.

And then, within the space of a few years, Brian found himself cast out of his own life—excommunicated by friends and family, unable to work, divorced by his wife.

It was the kind of theatrical downfall that, in a different era, would sometimes follow the breaking of some dire taboo, like getting pregnant out of wedlock, or advocating communism at the neighborhood potluck. Only in this case it was because Brian had gotten sick, and the kind of sick he got made sense to no one. Because of this he was thrust past sick to some farther margin of society’s firelight, an outer dark where order and reason gave way to uncertainty and confusion.

When it began he had no idea what was wrong with him, only that he felt tired, and could no longer tolerate certain foods. But within months he found himself too fatigued to go out at night or play sports. Then he began reacting to specific triggers in his environment. Perfume set his heart racing. Paint fumes fogged his brain. Meanwhile the list of foods he could tolerate grew ever shorter.

He tried everything he could think of—acupuncture, chiropractors, supplements, methylation, even a fecal transplant courtesy of his wife—a final favor before the divorce. Nothing worked. Eventually he reached a point where he could no longer even stand to be indoors.

The last thread parted in the fall of 2014 when the Polar Vortex swept down from Canada, rousting Brian from where he was sheltering on his aunt’s back porch. With that he was adrift, without anchor or direction.

The swiftness, the methodical thoroughness, of Brian’s unmaking carried a certain Jobean trauma. A merciless humbling that stripped away everything, from material assets like clothes and housing to conceptual assets like threat awareness and body knowledge—as well as all the relationships that gave his life meaning.

His one solace was years in coming. But eventually he figured out that he was not the only one. There were others. Thousands. Millions.

They called themselves “sensitives,” because that is what they were. Environmental factors that to others were undetectable or benign—hair spray, for instance—were to them noxious or intolerable. Almost any chemical or toxin could be a trigger, but also cell phone radiation and some types of mold. Even the slightest exposure to the most ordinary products could be debilitating. A whiff of flavored coffee could shut them down for a week. So could a scented dog poo bag, a Wi-Fi router, ice cream with preservatives. In the beginning, the list of triggers tended to be very limited and specific, but as time went on the list could grow much longer.

The most common symptoms were fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches, and memory difficulties, but could include almost anything. And efforts to avoid them could lead to strikingly aberrant behavior. Hanging mail from a clothesline for a week to “off-gas” before daring to read it, for instance. Shaving facial hair to reduce susceptibility to airborne pesticides. Yanking out teeth. One sensitive, leery of chemically saturated waiting rooms, convinced her gynecologist to conduct his examination in the backseat of her car. Another, leery of laundry detergent, went nine years without clean sheets.

The phenomenon went by many names, including Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance, and Total Allergy Syndrome, but among them all I had found Environmental Illness, or EI, to be the most impartial and inclusive. First recognized in 1962, EI was believed to afflict as many as 42 million people nationwide. Over the last decade alone the prevalence had increased over 300 percent, with as much as 30 percent of the population experiencing some level of hypersensitivity.

No one was born with EI. Usually it commenced with a single massive toxic exposure, like a chemical spill, or else years of low-level exposures, as with a job at a plastics factory. Then came a bewildering period in which the victim struggled to make sense of a world where peril lurked around every corner. In the more extreme cases, this often involved exhausting their life savings on desperate treatments ranging from nutritional supplements to exorcism. Eventually, however, the attempt to cure the EI would be abandoned and the focus would shift to finding someplace in the world they could catch their breath and try to remember who they were. Some ended up in houses wallpapered in tinfoil, driving thirty-year-old Benzes with gutted electrical systems and solar panels on the roofs. Others didn’t leave their homes for years, or would only venture out wearing an industrial-grade respirator.

The endless search for refuge took its own toll. One sensitive I talked to had bought and sold four houses, losing $20,000 to $30,000 each time—and never got to live in any of them. Another said his EI had cost him $850,000. Those who had been financially shattered by the disease could be found living out of tents in national parks, or cars in Walmart parking lots, fleeing from one oasis to the next as the seasons changed—or even the winds, which often carried pollutants from nearby factories or farms.

“Sensitives,” they called themselves—but also “the new refugees,” or “runners”—this last a nod to the imperative that consumed the lives of so many as they fled one toxic exposure after another. One guy I’d spoken to claimed to have slept in 240 places in eight years. Another told me the only place he felt like his pre-EI self was halfway up Mount McKinley.

“A glacier on the side of a mountain is for me like paradise,” he said. “It’s about the only place in the world where my symptoms are gone completely.”

Talking with these folks you got the sense of a vast struggle invisibly underway all across the nation. A steady, Atlas-like exertion just to maintain hope.

“It’s almost like being a pregnant woman,” a sensitive named David Reeves told me. “A pregnant woman has all these crazy symptoms and she’s always kinda sick, and that’s what it’s like. Except, after nine months, man,...