Recommit. Again and again and again.

I practice recommitment on a monthly, weekly, daily—even moment-to-moment—basis. I also practice forgiveness. I forgive myself for not following through on previous commitments, goals, and self-promises. I let go of recriminations, self-flagellations, self-denigrations and I move on. Every morning I wake up and reassess my goals, because each new day, each new moment, is an opportunity for creation. Creation out of blank-slate nothingness.

For years I have envisioned myself drinking wheatgrass every day, juicing veggies and sprouts every day, practicing yoga and meditating every day. My reality looks a little different. Most days I am at the computer, letting my pc addiction control me and trying to soak up as much person-to-person energy as one can squeeze through the airways since I have a chronic illness that severely isolates me. Every night I imagine I will practice yoga the next morning. I will put some distance between me and the pc. I will create a life that fills me.

As many of you probably know firsthand, it's just not that simple. But I don't give up. Ever. I keep re-imagining this life, keep recommitting to my vision. I take baby steps. I drink wheatgrass 4 days a week. I juice a few days. I stretch my body daily. And I never give up my dream. I keep striving toward the light. Because that is all I have to hold onto.

How Lyme Disease Saved My Life

by Virginia T. Sherr, M.D.

When Lyme disease saved me, I had no clue that anything was really wrong with me, except there were some weird things that kept happening. For one thing, as I told an allergist, my sinuses, in waves, felt funny, and for the last several seasons, I'd gotten morning headaches after the house heat had been turned on in the autumn. He and I agreed that the furnace must have stirred up a new allergy to dust. Time went by, and for general safety, it occurred to me that it would be wise to buy carbon monoxide alarms for my home. To my amazement, a properly placed CO alarm in the basement immediately clamored a warning.

When the oil furnace repairman arrived and pointed out a one-inch crack - a separation between the furnace and the chimney - I was dumbstruck that it had gone unnoticed. Interestingly, the weird waves of nasal stuffiness and the morning headaches stopped with the repair of this crack in the flue.

In my psychiatric office, I had been listening for years to a subset of patients who were exquisitely sensitive to everything chemical in their lives. Medicine that required a dosage of 50 mg for the average person was too strong at 12.5 mg for them. Any commonplace side effects were magnified, and therefore, the idea of taking medicine had become anxiety producing to them and, I remembered, to myself as well, for the same reason.

At that time, the concept of a connection between medication and chemical sensitivity due to Lyme disease was unknown to me. It only occurred to me when, many years after a red ring rash on my arm, I finally was diagnosed as having Lyme disease and began to evaluate carefully my patients who had symptoms of tick-borne diseases. I found the majority of them to have extreme sensitivity to medications.

It turns out that Lyme disease tends to interfere with the metabolism of the liver in such a way that chemicals are processed too slowly. And there is a failure of "T4 thyroid hormone" to convert properly into T3 hormone at the cellular level. The spirochetal infection causes a Wilson's syndrome - a lowering of body temperature - which makes all chemical reactions sluggish. This causes a backlog of molecules, which are imperfectly metabolized if at all and which then act as if the person has taken an overdose. The side effects, not the desired effects, became the patient's main focus, and the person usually wishes to forgo future trials of all medications.

In my case, extreme sensitivity to small amounts of carbon monoxide may have registered in the form of waves of sinus stuffiness and related headaches.

As a psychiatrist, I am aware that the unconscious mind often tries to alert us to our specific critical needs. For example, one frequently hears the exclamation: "I was dreaming of a waterfall, and it woke me; then realized I really had to urinate." I had lived in my home for decades without CO detectors, headaches, or nasal/sinus stuffiness. I have no doubt that my personal chemical sensitivity caused by Lyme disease caused me to respond symptomatically to trace amounts of carbon monoxide. Those symptoms started my quest for answers and perhaps led, subconsciously, to my choice of having the CO monitor installed. I had never consciously considered CO poisoning as a factor because I thought I had a state-of-the-art furnace. But it was the gap in the flue that gave me a break.

Like a canary in the mineshaft of old, my unknown chemical sensitivity may have acted as an early-warning system for invisible noxious fumes. The heightened awareness that something was wrong was akin to the noticeable effect of the "drug-sensitive" canaries that keeled over at the first hint of carbon monoxide, their sacrifice alerting and ultimately saving coal-miners from a toxic CO level in their workplace. In my case, my own sinuses, then the CO alarms led to the solution of the external toxic problem and ended the deadly risk of eventual serious CO contamination of my household.

No longer reluctant, I now am pleased to offer credit where credit is due - to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the then as-yet undetected tick-borne disease that very likely helped to rescue me, while also changing my life's direction dramatically and forever.


Virginia T. Sherr, M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Holland, PA. Her writings about lyme and related illnesses can be found on her website
thehumansideoflyme.net.

Tick menagerie: Lyme isn't the only disease you can get from a tick

by Pamela Weintraub


From the time National Institutes of Health medical entomologist Willy Burgdorfer first sliced open deer ticks from Shelter Island (off of Long Island) and studied them under the microscope in his Montana lab, he observed a glut of microbes. He traced just one of them—B. burgdorferi, the spirochete named after him—to the disease studied in Connecticut and called Lyme.

But right from the start he suspected that as far as the patients went, other organisms could be involved as well. Sitting next to Burgdorfer in a sun-drenched conference room at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, I watched him remove from his ancient briefcase a handwritten chart that had withstood the test of time. Yellowed and creased, the paper listed microbes, six in all. "These," he told me, "are what I found in the Shelter Island ticks."

He would not give me a copy, but he let me look. I saw the spirochete B. burgdorferi on his chart, of course, but I also observed an organism, larger than a bacterium, called a nematode worm. (The worm's potential for disease, said Burgdorfer, was unknown.)

I took definite note, therefore, when Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Institute for Ecosystem Studies, in the Dutchess County town of Millbrook, New York, told me he'd found nematode worms in deer ticks, too.

I paid even more attention when the finding was confirmed in Connecticut by University of New Haven microbiologist Eva Sapi and announced at the school's Lyme symposium in 2007. Neither scientist knew what to make of the worms, nor that they'd been observed by others before.

Whether nematode worms living in ticks will ever be implicated in human disease has yet to be seen. But if they are, says Sapi, then treating that infection could make all the difference in the world for a subset of patients who remain sick.

The take-home message is this: Ticks that carry the pathogen of Lyme disease harbor many other organisms, some known to cause serious human disease, others not traced to human infection or still undiscovered and unexplored. Over the next few weeks, look to this space for coverage of the coinfections accompanying or mistaken for the common epidemic disease called Lyme.


Pamela Weintraub is the author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic and senior editor at Discover Magazine. This essay is part of a series found on her blog.

She Speaks in Metaphors (I Understand)

by Julie Laffin © 2009

Winged Dead Cyprus Tree © 2008 Julie Laffin. All rights reserved.

Your Fluid Body is Frozen

My doctor (one of them) says my entire left side is jammed. It's like shrink-wrapped plastic wrap, tight and brittle but it should be like one large, flowing, unified teardrop. It should have coherence and flexibility and it should breathe. I guess this assessment could explain some things: why I feel like I'm constantly falling to the left, why when I get exposed to synthetic fragrances my face goes numb on the left side and not the right, why my left leg and foot often lose all sensation from diesel exhaust exposures no matter how small, why my left arm and leg will start to tremor spontaneously, why my left eye twitches and spasms randomly, why there is constant pain in my left foot and a varicose vein in my left leg and why I have a mass on the left side of my neck at the carotid artery and am constantly clenching the left side of my jaw. My fluid body on that whole side is frozen. It may in fact, at this very moment, be trying to launch a rebellion.

Going after Stealth Pathogens © 2008 Julie Laffin. All rights reserved.

Keep Your Eyes Off the Snake

Suppose I take a square of beautiful blue paper and tape it to the wall. Then I take a rubber snake and hang it in front of that beautiful blue square. The goal is to focus on the blue area no matter what the snake is doing. That's my assignment. If someone pulls on the snake I should be still, stay with the blue area and disregard the turbulent and frenetic energy of the snake. She says to me, "Don't be seduced by the chaos. The place of healing is not chaotic. Try to find the quiet, still place of gratitude." I try and try and try. Sometimes I can actually muster it.

Most days, finding that place is not so easy and I feel like I'm being forced to watch my health slip away, day by day, moment by moment. It's become like watching a movie, a slow torturous one at that. Not being seduced by the chaos was never my forte and now that my severe environmental illness is so easily triggered, I have the challenge of not getting emotionally and physically flattened by bizarre physical, sometimes unrelenting, reactions.

Last year I was diagnosed with advanced, neurological Lyme Disease and actually relished in this diagnosis. It seemed there was finally an explanation and possibly even a treatment or cure for a confusing, strange, and prolonged (over four years) lapse of health. My relief was short-lived when I found out the hard way, that because I am now so severely chemically intolerant, I cannot take long term antibiotics. With each trial of antibiotics I lost even greater chunks of the health I had left. So far, I have not been able to recover these long lost parts.

My Own Worst Enemy: Safe House Bathroom, Snowflake, AZ © 2008 Julie Laffin

The Monastic Life

She asked me if I could see any possible good in being forced away from society, being asked to give up social interaction and professional goals. But the list of losses is long: income and career, relationships, identity, artistic accomplishments, time with family, meeting my newborn nieces and nephews, celebrating holidays, simple daily pleasures, feeling good, freedom to move about in the world without getting severely ill. And faith. It's been hard letting go of faith in the process of life and the belief that when presented with options most people will do the right thing. I had to give up the notion that most people would rather go without their perfume than forgo spending time with me and that if they knew their use of lawn chemicals could send me to the hospital (an experience itself that could now jeopardize my life) they would find another solution for killing their weeds that did not involve nuking their lawns with agent orange delivered via high pressure hoses. In fairness, there are some that have. But I believe there is a special place in hell for the falsely pious in our midst that have no actual concept of brotherly love or compassion for the suffering of others. Since becoming disabled I have discovered a fear and loathing of those who are different I could never have previously understood had I not experienced it, had I not felt it being directed at me.

Which bring me to one more loss; loss of respect for people who would rather write me off as a neurotic, headcase than learn about a growing problem that afflicts a huge number of people worldwide.

Will any good come of having to move away from Chicago and learn a new way of being with my husband who has now been granted the thankless job of becoming my primary caretaker? Perhaps. I've learned I married a man with depth of character not easily matched by his peers. My love for my husband has solidified and expanded. In sickness and in health, gratefully he took it seriously. Is there anything good that will come of living in isolation and shedding all earthly desires, ambitions or aspirations? Hmmmm, let's see…I'm saving a lot of money (I no longer have) on dressing for success, dining out and foreign travel. And I never have to attend baby showers anymore.

On the Table

I went to see her for the first time wearing a gas mask and carrying a charcoal impregnated blanket to cover the table to keep myself from picking up any leftover chemicals on the vinyl covered exam table. But the mask had the wrong kind of filter (particle not VOC) and I had to leave because there was residual fragrance in the room. The silicone material of the gas mask itself makes me sick, but not as sick as fragrance or cleaning solvent residues. Pick your poison. I came for her to lay her hands on me and manipulate and heal me but I could not tolerate being in her office or the building. I could smell the air freshener drifting in from an adjacent office and the lingering scent of cleaning supplies. But she understands. She knows I'm not making it up. She knows I become easily impaired by things no one else will even notice. Twenty years ago she was like me. During medical school she was poisoned by formaldehyde and it took her a long time to recover. This gives me hope. There are so few stories of recovery in my little understood universe.

On the Floor

I have assignments to do at home. She had me get pillows and blankets and put them on my bedroom floor and lie down. Then she talked me through "the constant resting position." She said there is usually a position most people can assume which allows them to find a place of non-pain. It's a delicate balance sometimes struck by moving the foot an inch to the left or raising the neck up slightly to eliminate the curve it wants to otherwise habitually assume. I find it. Later I apply ice and heat. I feel a sense of hope and remember what it's like to be happy. I remember the good people in my life and all they do for me and how much they care.

You Are Going to Get Better

She doesn't seem like someone who will give up on me easily. Gratefully, there are no drugs to take and she has not tried to sell me a hefty bag full of herbs and vitamin supplements. She did suggest I purchase some magnesium from the health food store for relaxing the muscles on my shrink-wrapped left side and for warding off migraines. My homework for next week is to Google the "Alexander Technique" and check out the "Feldenkrais Method." It seems daunting since the simplest of yoga poses can throw my muscles into painful spasms for hours. (I should have just tried the gentle, vertical poses as my friend Lisa suggested). After being on this earth for almost fifty years, I am having to learn a new way of being in my body. Instead of me commanding it, it will be instructing me. Instead of whipping it into shape at the gym, I am now forced to bow to its whims and learn its (seemingly foreign) language. If I ever get to the other side of this illness, the cost will be complete and utter surrender. The reward will be absolute transformation.

Seeking the Root of the Problem © 2008 Julie Laffin. All rights reserved.

The Elusive Obvious

I've spent the past four and a half years scanning my past and culling for clues as to why I developed this condition. I have devoured article after article on the internet, consulted with and received treatment from the best environmental illness doctors in the country. I've listened attentively in chat rooms to the vivid details of other people's illnesses hoping to glean any tiny insight about what happened to many of us and how I might apply the lessons they have learned to my own situation and extend that information and hope to others. Here are the facts: I have a positive Western Blot for Lyme Disease, my health began to deteriorate rapidly after washing and drying several military blankets laced with mothballs in my art studio and a subsequent exposure to a potent odor neutralizer in a hotel soon after.

End of the Long Wash, Apache County, AZ © 2008 Julie Laffin. All rights reserved.

The Long Road Back

My husband tells me I'm a fighter and that I'm stronger than I think. Some days I believe him but on others I anaesthetize myself with fantasies of the next life or the past…the lovely, elusive and healthy past. Just recently I've been able to visualize a future in which I'm well and happy. Andy is there beside me. I sit myself down now each day and require myself to dwell in this mindset. There are gaping, dark holes in this newly evolving moving picture and I admit I can't see the roadmap in much detail. When I think I have the blueprint firmly fixed, precisely nailed down, it slips away. But I can see, feel and even revel in the promise of having arrived at the destination. There are sweet moments now where I can taste and smell transcendence. Today, I hunker down, set my sights on the blue square and resist the temptation of giving what's left of my ravaged self and dysfunctional immune system to the snake. Only recently, for the first time in four years I'm able to imagine a life for myself in which I've eclipsed my current state of being, a new commitment that has become my daily practice.


Julie Laffin is a Chicago-based performance artist currently working on transforming her work to embrace and transcend her health challenges.

Living a holistic life

by Joshua Rosenthal, director of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition


A holistic lifestyle is more than just eating organic foods and practicing yoga from time to time. It means paying attention to all aspects of your life: relationships, career, health and spirituality to be sure that you are living a life in balance. This might mean making some adjustments. The important thing to realize is they are not quick fixes.

Take a minute now to think about all areas of your life:

Relationships: Are you surrounded by people who stimulate you? Do your friends and romantic partner make you laugh and are they kind to you? Are there people you can be spending more time with or less time with? Make an effort to spend more time with those who fill your life with joy.

Career: Are you satisfied with your day-to-day job? Do you feel challenged by your boss and your coworkers? Do you feel that you are compensated well for your hard work? Are you happy more than you are stressed-out? Make a list of the things you love about your job and the things that you do not.

Spirituality: Do you have a spiritual practice? This can be anything from meditating to going to church on a regular basis.

Health: Pay attention to the foods you eat. Do you enjoy whole grains, fruits and vegetables every day? How often do you consume junk food? When you crave sweets write down what you are doing. Sometimes when we crave junk food it means that something else in our lives is out of balance.

Everyone could nourish their relationships, career, spirituality and health a little more. By nourishing all aspects of your life you will live a healthier and happier life. What are you going to do today?

Joshua Rosenthal, MScEd is founder, director and primary teacher of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. He is a highly trained leader with more than 25 years of experience in the fields of whole foods, personal coaching, curriculum development, teaching and nutritional counseling. His simple approach allows people to quickly and successfully reach new levels of health and happiness.

Personal | Political

Some of you may be wondering: what's with the thrive! journal header imagery? It has a very hippie-esque back-to-the land aesthetic to it. Why did you choose to use this visual to represent your website?

The brutal truth is this: it was not so much a choice, inasmuch as people suffering from chemical injury may not have much of a choice in where they can live, how they dress, and how they look. The header collage for this blog represents my life, as founder of the website and person living with severe chemical, electrical, and other sensitivities.

I was forced to leave my formerly comfortable suburban neighborhoods in search of cell tower-, WiFi-, and chemical-free living spaces. This is what it looks like. I am unable to get a haircut, as I can't be near a chemical-laden hair stylist for the 20 minutes or so it would take to get a badly needed trim. My boyfriend can only manage to shave his facial hair every two weeks, and he must do so without the aid of soap/shaving cream or lotions to protect his skin. Some of us must live in refurbished Airstream trailers in the middle of nowhere just to have a clear head the whole day through. My best friend (far left) is at peace only in the high desert where she can escape her neighbors' fabric softeners and pesticides which cause severe neurological symptoms that wake her up in the middle of the night.

These are the realities of living with chemical injury. We have no choice but to live with it, manage it, and learn how to thrive in spite of it. I could have used a more socially acceptable visual for this blog, but part of our mission is to make this condition more visible. We are people who are rarely seen in public, some of us relegated to the "safety" of our homes for years with little direct human contact.

The personal is now political. The collage at the top of this page reflects parts of my life and the world I have created through years of effort. I've worked long and hard to seek out and surround myself with amazingly supportive people, and live in an environment that adds to my health rather than detracts.

I dream of living close to nature surrounded by these friends, who have become family. I dream of a world where we can all live to our greatest potential rather than be limited by other people's personal care habits. This is my dream. What is yours?

Glass Half Full

Living with a chronic illness is not easy. Especially when your symptoms include severe depression and hopelessness. It can take work to turn the picture upside down and see the glass as half full. But I can tell you that the effort is well worth it.

On my bad days, all I can see is that I am in my sixth year living in near isolation, that I have two tolerable outfits to my name that haven't been washed in months, I have no towels I can use, no bedding or bed, I sleep on a cold tile floor shivering in the dark, and my health seems to be getting more fragile with each passing day. I have friends and a boyfriend, but due to our severe sensitivities to chemicals and other environmental influences, during the long winter we mostly have a phone relationship. I haven't seen my family in over a year. With these grey-colored lenses on, it's hard to see much reason for going on.

On my good days, I am ever-so-thankful. My house-prison is transformed into a safe home on 20 acres to buffer me from neighbors' toxic practices. This desolate area becomes a beautiful landscape that my dreams can find a home in. My connections to friends and my boyfriend are incredibly cherished and deep—the kind of relationships I always craved but could never find growing up. The restrictions of my illness force me to live in alignment with a value system I always had but was too lazy/cowardly/apathetic to enforce. The boredom of hours freed up from lack of career/social life/activity opens up a space where I get to share my voice and vision.

How can you transform those things that bind you and drag you down? I challenge anyone reading this to take a list of all the terrible parts of their life and create something beautiful about each and every one.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And perspective/attitude is everything.

let it flow

Blocked energy results in stagnation. Stagnation can contribute to disease. As part of my personal healing initiative, I promised myself this year to focus on "flow" and to open up all those blocked passages in body and mind.

One result of this is the "primal scream" practice I began a few months ago after moving to a more desolate locale—when I get certain chemical exposures, I find it so healing to open up those airways and let my angst out, as loud as possible. Now that I have few neighbors, and none within screaming distance (I think!??), I feel completely comfortable doing what I never did for the past 42 years of my life.

Another promise I made to myself was to start bellydancing and practicing yoga again. I need to get this body moving, get the juices flowing, and put those stored toxins on an express train outta here.

And when love surprisingly came knocking on my door last year, it brought with it an unexpected opportunity to let my emotions flow more freely. Being in a relationship takes work—especially when both people are disabled and have daily challenges that can create huge amounts of stress. Communication becomes so important, and my honey and I work hard at keeping ours open and unblocked.

Like the spaces in our bodies that can become weighed down and sluggish, so too can our connections to others. Since becoming severely chemically and electrically sensitive, I have been very isolated and have functioned in a dark vacuum for much of the time. In the name of "flow," I am now reaching out to collaborate with others and open up those channels for greater healing.

I started this journal over a year ago but never got back to it. I'm excited to be starting it up again, this time with help from my friends and colleagues. We will be featuring guest bloggers who will post about all things related to the continuum of health, from the point-of-view of the chronically ill patient, physician, healer, and everyday person. So please join me as I join hands with other beautiful beings on a healing path to wholeness!