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April 25, 2004

Munchausen

I'm taking a printing class. In a printing shop, you use a lot of nasty chemicals, not the least of which are the solvents used to clean the press. This stuff will make you light-headed if you breathe it in for too long.

At the beginning of our last class, the teacher made an announcement: nobody was to come to class having washed with scented soap, because one of our classmates had a chemical sensitivity, and the scent was the cause of it. Oddly enough, this person had no trouble being in a closed room with open containers of type wash. Type wash is a mixture of acetone, toluene, methyl ethyl ketone, and isopropyl alcohol. This is not nice stuff, and trust me, if you're sensitive to the sort of carrier for perfumes in shampoo, that cocktail is going to knock you on your butt fair and square all on its own.

But instead of her leaving class and giving up on printing because it was too toxic for her, we were supposed to forgo bathing before class.

Oddly, this student was perfectly fine with spending all day in the printing shop working away on her project, as long as she didn't smell any pleasant smells. It was contact with a perfume that did her in, not the printing chemicals. "I lost a day of work because of it last week," she complained to me. I was surprised that she could function so close to me, because I was literally awash with scent, having washed both body and hair with scented products, and even applied a scented deodorant only half an hour before this scene took place.

I find it intriguing that most of the "victims" of this "disease" are women, and most of them are disempowered in some way. It's like the modern version of neuralgia; a convenient disease to lean on, and one which would naturally incapacitate a person at random. In the old days, women would find their neuralgia acting up whenever important decisions needed to be made. These days they get migraines and have to retire to bed because somebody wore perfume near them.

Add to the mixture the thrill of having a disease that supposedly confounds the medical community, and you get a set of ingredients for a perfect whine. MCS "sufferers" always seem to be able to make everybody else around them suffer, too. They prohibit other people from using scented products (but somehow don't notice the use of those products if they're not told about them). They make other people give in to the greater need of their "illness" as a way of gaining control and power. And if you point it out to them they fall back on the argument that you're insensitive to their plight. Everybody else is always the bad person, you see.

I used to argue with these people. I had to stop, because the more you argue with them the more energy you give them. The more you argue with them, the more you validate their victim role. I find the perpetual whiner type really tiresome, and try to avoid them at all costs. It took a real effort to not point out the inconsistencies in my classmate's self-diagnosis to her; I almsot suggested she see Noel's allergist because "he's one of the best allergists in the city," but I decided I didn't want to be remotely sympathetic to her, and suggesting she might legitimately be getting sick from perfume would have had that effect.

Posted by ayse on 04/25/04 at 10:55 PM

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April 25, 2004

Munchausen