Diluted barium washed across silver leaf creates a muted rosy glow, giving an old world patina to newly gilded furniture. The vapors are also extremely unpleasant and persistent. You don’t just inhale the stuff - the fumes stick to your skin and seep into your pores. Hot showers later just bring back the fumes. It’s nauseating.
I was pregnant during the week-long class where I first learned to tarnish silver, copper and brass leaf with barium and other chemicals. But I didn’t know it until I had a miscarriage the week after. According to the material safety data sheet (MSDS) for barium carbonate, some side effects of exposure include urinary retention and testicular tenderness. Could my miscarriage have been another?
This was the mid-1980s. I had just left a corporate job and helped to start a small furniture finishing business. “Painted finishes,” speckly zolatone, wall glazes, stencils, and gilding were in vogue back then and so our fledgling business prospered.
Color was big, but no one was “thinking green.” Designers ignored the toxicity of automotive lacquers and didn’t consider the health consequences of installing freshly off-gassing cabinetry in homes. As finishers, we had material safety data sheets for each product, which informed us about hazards and “safe” application. However, as finishers, we were also at the mercy of the specification and bidding process. If we got the job, we had to use what the designer wanted. Of course, we used spray booths, protective masks, respirators, goggles, gloves, and paper suits to cut down on exposures.
That miscarriage plunged me into my first investigation of toxic chemicals and their effect on human reproduction. I researched teratogens, mutagens and reproductive hazards contained in paints, lacquer and other art supplies. What I found was alarming, so I wrote a tract called “Paint and Pregnancy.” I gave copies to a few paint stores in San Francisco, hoping shop clerks would hand them to female customers as a cautionary measure. But probably they just got chucked in the wastebasket.
Toxins Stopped Eating My Babies
The next time I got pregnant, I got the hell out of the finishing shop. Though I stopped sucking up lacquer fumes, other things began to make me sick. For example, I experienced excruciating headaches and dizziness from perfume. At first, I chalked this up to the weirdness of being pregnant. Eventually, I was hospitalized with pre-term labor and spent a total of eleven weeks on strict bed rest (you only get out of bed to pee). Fortunately, this worked. My first baby was born at term, healthy and whole. His father and I were greatly relieved and enormously glad.
My baby was fine, but this pregnancy coincided with my sudden slide into the wacky world of environmental illness and multiple chemical sensitivity (EI/MCS). This is a pesky condition which includes an endless number of symptoms which can be caused by about 80,000 registered toxic chemicals, alone and in combination.
In addition to the usual challenges of sleep deprivation and other adjustments in caring for a new baby, I found I was always sick and terribly fatigued. I had one sinus infection after another. My reactions to perfume got worse. I reacted to other things too - mold in the house, paint fumes on my husband’s work clothes, the smell of gas leaking from our antique stove. Even the smell of newsprint, traces of hand lotion on money, certain aisles in grocery and drug stores, could make me feel awful. Probably the lowest point, in terms of energy, was the day I had to lie down and recover for twenty minutes after putting a stack of plates on a shelf.
For three years, I didn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t connect the dots. One day someone suggested I had “environmental illness,” a condition completely unknown to me until that moment. Her words provided a road map for learning about my condition, coping with it over the next several years, and even faint indications for eventual recovery.
I began to use respirators and face masks in public. I purged the house of all things scented and toxic. I scoured the Internet for information about chemical sensitivities and how to manage them. And I found a curious thing. A certain chemical which had shown up in many material safety data sheets for lacquers also showed up a list of common toxic ingredients in perfumes. This explained my acquired sensitivity to fragrances, but it also opened up a whole other can of worms. Why was it, I wondered, that a chemical which legally requires a material safety data sheet when purchased in a can of paint - with strict instructions and warnings to avoid skin and respiratory contact - is acceptable in a cosmetic product which is inhaled and applied to skin? Why were there no warnings? Hmmmm... something was awfully fishy in that can of worms....
I got pregnant again. I wanted to avoid an asthma attack during delivery and I wanted a fragrance-free birth. I didn’t want to dilate to 10 centimeters while wearing a respirator. With my obstetrician’s help, I requested accommodation for my chemical sensitivity in my birth plan. This was largely futile. I remember a horrible incident when I checked in to monitor pre-term labor contractions at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. A perfectly nice, but absolutely reeking nurse became quite upset when I requested a replacement. Pointing out the request for this accommodation in my birth plan did not decrease her distress. Is it any wonder that I ended up again in pre-term labor, with another bout of bed rest required? Or that the baby was accidently born at home? (At term, too, and very healthy.)
The challenges faced by parents of young children are manifold. My possession of a weird, misunderstood chronic condition didn’t help our family life. Still, we carried on. I was determined to provide an enriched childhood for my kids, volunteering at their schools and getting them out to the park and to special events whenever possible. Though I gloried in our outings, I inevitably had to drag the kids away from pockets of airborne toxins wafting around other participants. I tried to cultivate some gallows humor about this, but even people who really loved me got tired of hearing about “the solvent-based life form clutching a fume-fed baby who unwittingly chased us from the California Academy of Sciences with her cloying, god-awful perfume.”
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