Please Classify EHS as a Disability

Name:

Debra Martin

Location:

Sydney, Australia

How long have you been electrosensitive (and how long did it take you to make the link to EMFs?)

I have been Electrosensitive since 2008 but it took me 4 years to recognize what was making me sick.


Your story:

The story of becoming sick began in 2002.

I already had multiple food allergies/sensitivities I was reacting too at this stage but everything got suddenly worse after a mercury filling fell out and I swallowed it.

A few years earlier, the same thing had happened and that’s when the food allergies started. I started to experience severe brain/nervous system inflammation and out of desperation, went to a chiropractor.

For the following 5 years I worked for 2 Chiropractors and had Corrective treatment of 2-3 adjustments a week. All my symptoms went into remission.

In 2008, while working in Administration, I found as the intensity of adjustments wore off, the inflammation began to come back. Then another filling fell out and I swallowed a good deal of it again. Everything went downhill after that.

I told my boss I was reacting to the computer (which was wired), being on it all day and he put me out the back for a while which helped but I was needed on the computers and my Chronic Fatigue and inflammation worsened until I finally left burnt out.

I thought I’d overworked myself at the time and didn’t associate the fatigue and inflammation with EMF’s.

One of the Chiros I worked with adjusted me for nine months because I was so desperate and this helped to reduce the severity of my symptoms but never stopped them.

I continued to use computers and sometimes a mobile phone up until 2011 when I began to make the association with towers, Wi-Fi, mobile phones, tv’s, and computers. Even then, I still wasn’t aware of how badly they were affecting me.

My partner, 3 times, used a mobile phone in the car and put me into almost complete paralysis. This was caused by the severe fatigue that being in an enclosed space with the phone evoked. I couldn’t walk, talk, move and breathing was almost impossible as the energy it took to allow my chest to rise was inconceivable. It felt like I was dying.

Atrial Fibrillation would flare up because my blood was so thick, my heart was having trouble pumping blood. All of these things relate back to the way EMF causes red blood cells to stick together, preventing oxygen getting to the brain.

My partner on 2 of these occasions buried me in the sand at the beach and after about 30 minutes I could move again and within 2 hours I was functional. It took me until 2014 before I stopped all mobile phone use with family and friends in closed spaces and started recognizing that in unenclosed spaces, the blood thickening was affecting me in a different way.

I would develop lumps all through my lymphatic system, arms, neck, shoulder blades and these lumps didn’t go away when exposure ended. Sometimes they were there for months at a time, - painful, limiting, fatiguing, completely debilitating my life.

I was diagnosed with severe Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue in 2010, Hypothyroidism (Hashimotos) in 2011 and Atrial Fibrillation in 2012.

It took me years to recognize what was affecting me and then more years to realize how much I had to isolate myself.

Being in public places is a nightmare for me. I can’t go to shopping centres or restaurants anymore because the pain from exposure is so bad.

I had to see a Psychologist for over a year to deal with the panic attacks I was suffering from anxiety about people using mobile phones around me. He was sceptical at first but soon realized the physical manifestations of this apparent allergy to EMF were triggering the emotional component, not the other way round.

When I can’t avoid it and it gets me, my partner massages the lumps out throughout my whole body, and it takes a minimum of 4 painful massages before they clear, while I scream, fight and cry into a pillow but it’s the only way to stop months of debilitation and fatigue.

If he massages the lumps out, I can be over it all within 3 weeks usually but sometimes some of it still hangs around. I never stop searching for something that will help.

Most of my money is spent on supplements that keep me functional. I live in the hot zone of a mobile phone tower and I have a large electrical box out the front of my house, but I’ve been lucky up until recently because I’ve been surrounded by rural land.

This is all being bulldozed away now as suburbia moves in. I still count my blessings that I can use a wired desktop with the box separated from where I am, and I can work around most things most days. I do my food shopping at night or low peak periods, I go to Tai Chi once a week because I’ve found that I can do some things where people are too active to use phones.

The isolation is probably the hardest thing to cope with, not having a support network, apart from my partner who understands, and a few friends online. I miss my kids birthday dinners and events now and that’s hard. But I still believe I’m one of the lucky ones. So many people are walking around designating the destruction of their health with their technology.

I recently heard a talk by Dr Amy yasko on the hidden symptoms of H.Pylori and how it shuts down Thyroid function and Liver Detox pathways so I demanded a breath test.

Because I didn’t have the common symptoms my Dr flatly refused but finally agreed. The test showed a severe infection that had been there most of my life. Clearing it left trouble with ulceration which can take up to 2 years to repair but my tolerance to EMF increased significantly.

I still suffer the headaches, Fibromyalgia in the gut and some pain through my upper body, most of which now subsides when I move out of range. This never happened before and I’m confident it will improve as I heal the Intestinal Permeability.

I recommend anyone with EHS get tested for this bug as 75% of the world has it. The inability of the Liver to detox toxins, causing them to recirculate through the body, may be a high contributory factor in EHS along with gut permeability which causes chemical alterations in the brain.

What you'd like your friends and family to know about your life now, and what you'd like them to do

My friends and family try to understand but they still make jokes about it and make me feel like a head case, like I’m imagining what happens to me, or they sometimes use the internet on their phones around me thinking if I don’t know it won’t hurt me so I’d want them to really understand how hard this is.

What you'd like health professionals to do, based on your experience

I would love to see more health professionals heard about EHS and really get the word out there. I’d love to see EHS become more socially accepted as the Disability it is and for more Doctors to understand it. It would make life so much easier if safe areas were provided at health care facilities such as Doctors’ offices and Hospitals too as these places are so hard to access.

What you'd like politicians, and those in authority, to do

I’d love to see EHS reclassified as a Disability and also for EMF to be recognised as a definite carcinogen, causing worldwide standards and services to be reassessed for the safety of all. It would be a relief to see Government funded refuges that provide safe spaces for those with EHS and for restrictive laws to come into place in public places.