Impulsively, I went online, looking for a rental, my mould-induced-scatterbrained thoughts: just a rolling tumbleweeds in the moment. The area I’m building in is made up of a hundred or so houses; the likelihood of finding a suitable rental there is made up of the odds: 1 to nothing. It took one year to find the rental I’m in now (on the opposite, busy end of town). And usually, its’s old non-renovated beach shack at max. However, the outside air is clean when my neighbours are not spraying, burning (illegally) and mowing. The traffic is low, even in the terrorist tourist season because there are no shops on my new side of town. Alas, there’s a beach and a marine national park, which just means fishing to some. Even if our oceans are suffering. Who cares, he’?! I do.
The side of town, I’m on now is right near the bay; during weekends, the sunnier it is, the more I’m locked inside with the noise of the two InovaAir filters being the soundtrack to my life. I don’t care. Air-conditioned days are my friend because VOCs cannot outgass. I get the most writing done, sitting in bed, on those days. My dog, Bella, is not impressed (even though she’s off the prozac!); but as Bubba say’s: “What can I do?”
Borrow money. Move to a new rental. Feel it: Exciting, the idea that mould is the only thing making me sick, holding me back from living a life that goes beyond YouTube where I hang out with real people with real faces, not just words typed into a message. The liberation of excitement, hope: An idea I’ve had before when I moved here into WDB no.2 back in 2013: at first. while I cleaned the house, I slept in the wild: my idea of that anyway. Maybe I bought the mould with me; maybe the water damaged ceiling that leaked about a year ago did it. It had already been fixed when I moved in; only to leak again. The owners, gracefully, replaced the roof but the chipboard ceiling remained. It’s only now that I’ve been told I have all the markings of CIRS that I look up at the ceiling and see the water stains do look bigger indeed.
So I’m on the move again. If the next place is a WDB, just shoot me now. Twice, just too make sure.
I’m sick enough to warrant that. I have to try (to live without mould (not get shot, LOL!)). (Have I blogged about how I’m on oxygen? and was told by a doctor that I appear to have CIRS from living in a water damaged building (WDB)? X 2. Two WDBs. If I move somewhere else, I can have some time and a mould-free area to try and remediate some of my possessions before moving into the build, which if it goes mouldy, I most likely, can’t move out of because I will owe the bank half of half a million dollars.
UPDATE on the build: our bricky cancelled. Am trying to find a new one. We are supposed to be at lock up stage due to the fact that it’s Autumn and it’s that time of year where outdoor moulds are prevalent.
So, for the third time, I will easily give my possessions to charity. All soft furnishings. Mattresses. Maybe electrical. I will gladly, gracefully give all or most of my stuff the St Kilda Gatehouse. (If the Swiffer testing shows that I need to. I didn’t do mould testing last time, just went off of my symptoms and followed some mould protocol I picked from people’s brains in some forums I belong to on the internet. “Mould is not your only problem,” said my Allergist.)
St kilda Gatehouse; a place in my heart. I’ve been giving to this worthy charity since 2010 when I read this book, Red Light Dark Room: sex, lives and stereotypes, a coffee table book fraught with images of the girls, women, boys, men and family that make up St Kilda’s sex industry street workers.
I enjoy giving my hard-to-part-with things to these people.
St Kilda Gatehouse is a safe haven that St Kilda street sex workers and those with life controlling addictions experience as “their place”. Some of the support offered is:
* Community space
* Advocacy and referrals
* Counselling
* Emergency aid
* Prison and hospital visits
St Kilda Gatehouse is made up of professionally trained staff and volunteers who work alongside the communities and individuals who access the Centre. Together they use basic, creative and inventive ways to address the issues that confront street sex workers and those with life controlling addictions.
In Novel 2010, at Victoria University (VU) I wrote about the sex industry for a couple of subjects. Mostly from a social justice angle but also a fictitious one. I only wrote about this topic in my fiction classes, where graciously, I was given the freedom and space to write about what I wanted to write about: the sex industry. I workshopped my chapters with the whole class and was never given anything but professional feedback on my work. I’m so proud of those classes I took at St Albans, VU!
Thanks, again to any of my classmates that read this xo
At the end of one of my Fiction classes (Fiction 2, I think?), I asked for donations of clothes, particularly items for babies, old lipsticks!, make-up not used, personal care products (Yeah, I know dear Canaries, I had so much to give 🙂 )
I ended up with a whole car load! I took some garbage bags to school that night so I could cover the stuff with them because of the washing powder. I mean, think about this: I am chemically sensitive and can’t have anyone in my class wear fragrance products, yet here I am asking for them so we can all collectively donate to St Kilda Gatehouse. It was heartening to know my novel’s character touched their writers’ hearts enough to want to give.
It was in this class that one pregnant person said to me, I’ve changed their lives. They would only use organic clean products after meeting me. I explained how organic is not the concern so much as fragrance and the use of products containing chemical-irritants.
Wish I had a list. Everyone bangs on about toxins, but unless it’s biotoxins from mould, chemical-irritants are what harms us. “Toxin” is a weak, vague word! Chemical-Irritants are what’s in luxury fragrances.
When I gave away my possessions due to fragrance ‘allergy’ and after the 2 mouldy houses, I put a note on my charity bags not to give to any families who have asthma or health conditions. People are on the streets who need warm clothing. But I don’t want their health getting touched by mould. Certainly not in the way I’ve been touched. It’s the worse thing. Well not the worse thing that can happen to these people who need our help:
I wrote and article, ‘She’s Someone: A Peaceful Gathering to Honour Tracey‘; sadly, shockingly, wrongly, she was murdered at St Kilda. Her killer was never found. That’s the worse thing that can happen…
BACK TO THE MOULD
I am doing testing this time via a place I found via here. I can’t spend my life washing and sniffing things to see if they’re clean yet; and I can’t keep asking others, like my carer, to do it for me. I only have cold water to wash with so can’t give all my stuff a good hot wash. Besides, I did that last time at the WDB (Water Damaged Building) I lived in before this one.) I can’t, WON’T part with my books, which are the worst offenders for mustiness. I love the smell of an old book; but my body won’t tolerate the chemicals (yet): ink better than mould though. I’ve replaced a lot of my old books with newer version because they had the perfume I use to use all over them.)
But yeah, I’m looking for a way out. We found a new rental. So not only am I building a house, I am renting another house as a chemically sensitive person, which involves a lot of cleaning up of other renters fragrances. All the fragrance that is in previously rented houses doesn’t always wash away but sometimes, and less, more than often, the fragrance comes off and we’ve found a suitable place to live where we won’t get headaches and amplified chronic illness. Like I hope I have.
This new house has carpet. But I felt better as soon as I walked in. There are a lot of tiles. And the areas that are tiled are closed off from the rest of the house’s carpet. It hasn’t been lived in for a while, always a bonus. And has air-conditioning, which I need on a lot of the time. The Australian Government gives me a rebate for this over the summer period because it’s on 24/7. Yes, I get cold.
I can’t be this sick for such a long time: it’s almost, at times, unbearable. (The times when friends and family are not on your side with the fragrances issue; that’s what makes it unbearable. How can I go to a University and be accommodated but not by people who say they love me? Dan? Bubba?) Now it “appears that I have CIRS” and that I may have physical proof and a disease code to back up my illness, I’m even more chuffed that all I have to do is a few more tests, an MRI (last Thursday)
and move away from the mould so I can get my Macrons tested and take binders to rid my body of the biotoxins (I am told). No wonder I feel so sick. I’m lucky if I have 1 or 2 days a week where I’m well enough to chase up, follow up and decide on house products and issues. I’m lucky I have oxygen as it allows my brain to function at full flight. In bed, writing all day: there are benefits!
Possessions are not the only thing to count unless that’s all you have. If you have no family and you have the nicest clothes you can afford, and live alone and get to write all the time, that sounds good to me. Throwing out your beautiful clothes, not so good,
(I am washing with cold water in the machine we bought over from the other WDB. We keep it outside but not having hot water is bad because I can’t wash mould out. We do use a hell of a lot of vinegar, FF soap and bicarbonate of soda. Once we move into the new house we will have to buy a new machine. I can’t believe there is no government rebate or assistance for mould impacted people, or chemically sensitive people. Neighbour sprays something en masse into your home while your windows are open, too bad. Life as you know it could be over. Unless you’re like, the Australian Prime Minister or something… )
This is the third time I will have to throw stuff out depending on the test results of the mould testing and the species.
The first time I threw out everything was because of the fragrance that was on all my stuff via perfumes, washing powders, everything with fragrance in it, which was everything I owned: and this was back in 2002-3-4. It took sometime. I still have old photos that have my old fragrances on them, which are now scanned. Sometimes, I sniff them so I can go back and remember, feel, almost ‘be’ back in that time of my life.
I got sucked in by Unilever’s smarmy and sexist and misogynistic advertising. I wore Blue Illusion Impulse Body spray for years. I carried it as a weapon in my bag in case I needed to spray it in a guy’s eyes. It says ‘CAUTION’ on the bottle. Oh, and I used it at age 15 to cover the bong smell in my bedroom, one time. I didn’t stop using it as a deodorant until I was 33 and got sick from ‘Inhalant Allergies’ aka ‘just discriminate against me now’ and aka ‘go live a housebound life’. And back when I gave away all my possessions in 2003 when a big truck came to take them away, I cried. I cried as I sat down at the table and threw out most of my photo albums. I’ve kept around 100 photos from my youth, early 20’s and 30’s.
I suppose I grew up that day: material possessions are nothing. If you don’t have your health or your family, you have nothing.
The first time, I gave all my stuff to another charity called The Salvation Army, who’d helped me out one time. I didn’t know the Gatehouse existed. I just hope my stuff went to a house with children who didn’t have respiratory illness impacted on by mould. You know, chemically sensitive children. Or children with MCS. Or worse, MCS and Electro hypersensitivity. Being marginalised and on the lower-socioeconomic scale and having a controversial illness is like a triple whammy.
I can only imagine the type of discrimination and exclusion they face on a day to day.
You know, there are people in our world who say that MCS doesn’t exist and that we’re mad? The media ignore us. The Australian NICNAS review made MCS it’s claim to fame (I mean they didn’t use IEI, did they?), but just didn’t follow up with any awareness programs or anything that could make our lives easier.
“A consistent finding from a number of Australian and overseas studies has been the need for further research. Following public consultation, including with MCS interest groups in Australia, a review report entitled A Scientific Review of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: Identifying Key Research Needs was published in November 2010…”
And we face the repercussions of that judgement and exclusion from the medical system via ‘No Disease Code’ in a huge way. Nearly all of us people with ‘MCS’ have lost family members and friends due to the systemic use and abuse of personal care products containing fragrances. Perfumes. Aftershaves. Lynx or Axe, depending on what side of the globe you are on–but still made by UNILEVER or some other corporation or company that refuses to use the products on IFRAs list of fragrance ingredients (See, they’re not hiding anything from consumers; just breaking up families and causing a lot of work for Disability Discrimination Legal Services (DDLS)). They could choose ingredients that are not chemical-irritants, sold on to the masses via the latest ‘luxury’ fragrance.
No one wants to stink, including me. I shower each day and I’m pretty sure I don’t smell bad. But everyone else, the whole world it seems, has fragrance on them. And I don’t fit in anymore.
Finding a rental is fraught with difficulty. Yet the first day I looked online I found a place that is carpeted with wool carpet upstairs and tiled downstairs and, get this, it’s one street away from our build so I won’t have to drive my car, which has a water leak in it. Dr Little says Aspergillus is growing under the carpet. He also says, “Mould is not your only problem.”
Anyone want to but a 98′ wagon suburb for 4k? Contact me: Skype Miche1239 (Mouldies don’t apply.)
More
Donate your warm jackets: The St Kilda Gatehouse
Buy the Book: Red Light Dark Room: Sex, Lives and Stereotypes
My ‘Weekend Notes’ article on Tracey Conelly: She’s Someone
My blog post on drops that worked: Pullaria Mould
The machines that are the soundtrack to my life: InovaAir Purifiers
MouldLab: ERMI sampling to show the levels of mould, which will determine if I keep my possessions or not
Debbie Savory says
8 April, 2016 at 2:57 amThere are a lot of tiles. And the areas that are tiled are closed off from the rest of the house’s carpet=sounds great
(I am washing with cold water in the machine we bought over from the other WDB. We keep it outside but not having hot water is bad because I can’t wash mould out. We do use a hell of a lot of vinegar, FF soap and bicarbonate of soda.= try borax ans for things that cant be soaked- hydrogen peroxide – both available in bulk to save $$$- do you want me to look into suppliers for you?
Found a place that is carpeted with wool upstairs and tiled downstairs and, get this, is one street away from our build so I won’t have to drive my car, which has a water leak in it-=awesome !!!
I so hope this works for you sweetie, I have fingers toes legs everything crossed for you,
love Deb<3
Michellina van Loder says
8 April, 2016 at 8:35 pmYes please. Thank you xx Hydrogen peroxide. I found a company, Marks Duct cleaning, who cleaned the air-conditioning ducts using a new broom and my cleaning chemicals without fragrance in them. They did that today. I wont move until 3 more weeks, maybe 2.
sabrina029 says
5 April, 2016 at 7:55 pmHow do you get the oxygen? Do you need a doctors script of something? Can you do a post on that? If I could have clean air to breathe on smoky nights my life would be so much better. I’m in QLD and they just light fires when the want even though it’s illegal or need permits. I hope rental works too. You do know carpet is bad for people with chemical sensitivity. It will be okay if it’s not mouldy. Good luck xx
Michellina van Loder says
8 April, 2016 at 3:56 pmYes, Sabrina, I will do a post on oxygen, how to get, why and where. xo
sabrina029 says
8 April, 2016 at 8:40 pmThanks, I need it so bad. Also, you didn’t answer about the carpet. Won’t that make you sicker because of the chemicals in the underlay?
Michellina van Loder says
12 April, 2016 at 12:47 pmHi Sabrina, I am doing the chipboard one you asked about today, IF it doesn’t get smokey on me. xo
Lindy Winnell says
5 April, 2016 at 1:14 pmThanks for your candid writings, and I struggle along the same way as you with the dreadful MCS ..Much Love, Lindy
El says
5 April, 2016 at 6:21 amAll the best with the new rental. I really really really hope it works out for you. Mold is such a horrid organism. I have it in my car and an unknown amount of my stuff too. You got a lot better once before. Please surely it can happen again when the living space is good enough.
sabrina029 says
16 April, 2016 at 8:51 pmYes, one would think it can be recreated so it happens again. I wish her to recover i the ways in which you expressed also, EI! What is it about cars and mould? Mine has it and I am so close to pulling the carpet out and going bareback!