As an environmentalist, I am an organic vegetarian. I avoid processed foods with ingredient names I can’t pronounce, use reusable tote bags, avidly recycle and drive a low-emissions car.
Yet, on the eve of my decision, I looked at my poor kitty. Despite applications of topical anti-flea drops, he’d been licking himself raw during the past four months. I had to take some kind of action, and fast.
The treatment seemed reasonable: An aerosol flea spray would be applied directly to the floor; it wasn’t some kind of flea bomb or fogger. I assumed that if there were risks or warnings or precautions I should know about, the pest control company, which we’d used to treat the exterior of our house against ants, would tell me. I decided to trust “the system” — which, I reasoned, was created to protect consumers, after all.
The next morning a man came to our house with two aerosol cans of a pesticide and targeted our hardwood floors and rugs, as well as the concrete floor in the basement. The pesticide — in the form of a mist designed to fall quickly to the floor — contained chemicals to kill insects and interrupt the life cycle of fleas.
The technician didn’t provide any instructions other than to take the cat and stay out of the house for three to four hours until the product had dried.
Six hours later, my husband and I returned home and found big wet drops all over the floors. When we called the pest control company, the manager was perplexed. He recommended that we mop up the residue, then throw away the sponge.
While my husband did the mopping, I wrote an instant message to a friend: “This is a disaster,” I typed. “Don’t worry about it,” he wrote back. “It’s no big deal.”
Strange symptoms
The next morning, I awoke to a headache in the back right quadrant of my skull. I felt a bit woozy and off balance and figured I was coming down with a cold. By evening, my arms were buzzing with an odd, electric energy. My husband and my cat were fine.
The next day, my left arm and leg felt icy hot. And my torso reacted to cold as if it were being stung by yellow jackets.
In another 24 hours, my fatigue was so intense that even if the house had been on fire, I couldn’t have peeled myself out of bed. A day later, my right side lost much of its strength. I struggled to brush my teeth, write, type and lift a fork. Standing up in the shower and lathering my hair became things I could no longer do at once.
Two trips to the emergency room ruled out a stroke and a brain tumor. But an MRI scan showed a lesion on the spinal cord in my neck. This scar or defect, I was told, had chewed away some of the protective myelin that coats nerves and transmits messages in the nervous system. This damage was scrambling messages being sent throughout my body about temperature and pain and strength and balance.
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