It's time for good news, bad news

[torquill]

So, the good news is that I managed to get my sight back. Well, 95% of it, but that's good enough. No headaches, only a small rim of peripheral vision gone, tracking properly, focus good, color and contrast excellent, able to visualize things like routes or objects, able to spell complex words from memory... all good.

How did I do it? With a shitload of cayenne pepper and B vitamins.

When I went to the optometrist, she established that my eye muscles were not responding consistently (my pupil function was fine). That could explain both the eyestrain headaches and the difficulty with focus. When I went home, I thought to myself well, the poor muscle response feels like the times when I've had an inflammatory flare and the muscles of my legs just won't work properly. They felt sticky and swollen. So I hit it with the most aggressive anti-inflammatory stuff I had (cayenne) and threw in a B-complex to help with whatever noise might be seeping into nerves whose myelin sheaths were compromised by inflammation.

By a few hours later I was almost fully recovered. Which, on the very plus side, means that the damage is not permanent; function can still be restored. On the minus side, there are very few causes of inflammation in the brain and surrounding tissues which aren't pretty alarming.

The next day was also great. I started working again on the weekend, and as long as I kept up the cayenne (I decided to lay off the Bs for the time being) I had very good functionality. So I had one part of the puzzle solved, even if I didn't know what was causing the inflammation.

On Monday night, Jen came to stay with me for a week. Claia dropped her off and stayed to chat for a bit, but I finally had to ask her to leave because I was getting a little woozy -- the condo she's living in is still steeped in mycotoxin, for all that they're in the middle of getting the mold taken out and everything rebuilt, and I'm sensitive enough that I react to her clothes.

Tuesday I saw the optometrist again, who declined to do a dilation when she heard about my reaction to the anesthetic -- apparently she had one patient experience a petit mal seizure, and wasn't comfortable risking my health. (I did ace the field test, which relieved her concerns about glaucoma.) So I went and did some weeding for a few hours before my therapy appointment. I was sore, but I had been weeding the day before too, so I didn't think much of it.

Today I woke up and my vision was as bad as ever. Cayenne didn't help much. B vitamins didn't help much. I started to wonder whether physical exertion was making it worse -- after all, it had cleared up somewhat while I was waiting out the rainy weather, and now I was doing a bunch of heavy work (I was thinking this while holding a pickaxe, digging a trench for new irrigation). But then I realized.... no. Claia had come by this morning to pick Jen up. I went in to have some food and take some cayenne, and I added some vitamin C to see what happened. And within 20 minutes I had about half of my vision back.

Good news: this means I know what's happening. Bad news: I've become a super-reactor to a particular class of aromatic hydrocarbons emitted by toxic mold, and they're causing swelling in my brain.

This isn't a new thought: there's a set of molds -- I think it might be in the Penicillum/Aspergillus class, the faster and less toxic wood molds -- which make me feel queasy, dizzy, and give me a raging headache in my temples and at the base of my skull; prolonged exposure makes it very hard to think, and I figured out after a while that what it was doing was making my brain swell. Fresh air would dissipate the effect within an hour, though, especially with the help of some vitamin C. (The mycotoxins produced by Stachybotrys, on the other hand, affect me for a much longer period, acting like a classic neurotoxin with digestive upset and the whole nine yards.) I've been exposed to this class multiple times over the last year, and a couple of times before that, while we were cleaning out my great-aunt's house. I've gotten progressively more sensitive with each exposure, to the point where now I react to Jen just because she has hugged and spent some hours in a car with a person who happens to live in the contaminated building. As of the time I'm writing this, she's been here about an hour and I'm back to the impairment level I had when I woke up this morning.

I shouldn't be able to react to my brother when he's spent two hours in that attic, come home, washed himself and his hair, and changed into fresh clothes from his own house, but I picked it up within minutes while we were conversing outside. This is super-reactor status -- beyond canary, I'm now like the most sensitive Geiger counter ever made, and I react to an aromatic hydrocarbon mix.

The first time I noticed there was a problem with Jen's condo was last April. Fun fact: I had my first heavy period in April. That might have been a fluke, but it was the start of a chain of events which ended up with my cycle going completely dysfunctional by midsummer. I had pinpointed pituitary malfunction as the cause of my woes when I saw a doctor in late January of this year, but the MRI showed nothing unusual (as far as I could tell)... now I know the probable reason for that. The MRI won't show simple inflammation if there isn't dramatic swelling, especially without contrast. If -- and I conjecture here -- if the inflammation started around the bottom of the brain and crept up to the space around the pituitary, it's a short hop from that to the optic nerve (striking me half-blind) and the space behind the eyes (mucking up my focal muscles). Anti-inflammatories knock it back, further exposure exacerbates it.

If this is the problem, there is probably jack-all that western medicine can do to mitigate it. I can avoid as many sources of toxic mold contamination as possible (Cherryland will be off-limits once D and M come back from boating in Mexico, as the boat is contaminated) but I can't avoid them all, and with every exposure I'll backslide again. I'll try my damndest to get the inflammation down to the point where I just(!) have pituitary issues, but it's entirely possible that this is progressive -- that I can randomly lose reliable vision for an unspecified period, and that it might start to affect other parts of my brain.

This is the MCS nightmare. I've been doing so well up to now, even healing from my solvent injury to a large extent, that I had never expected to find myself becoming hypersensitive to an environmental factor to this degree, but here it is. My cognitive function and my eyesight, which I built my future on, are now made unreliable by a factor outside my control.

So yeah. Good news, bad news.