Safe: The Strange Affliction of Cindy Duehring
Note that this text is adapted from an earlier writing of mine, published recently elsewhere on the internet.
In 1984, Cindy Duehring was a medical student in Washington State, working at a bank. An infestation of fleas affected her workplace and soon spread to her Seattle apartment. When it was fumigated, the exterminator illegally combined two insecticides together one of which was unsafe for indoor use. The result was her developing an extreme reaction as the toxic chemicals built up inside of her body. Her doctors said it was extraordinary that she wasn’t killed.
The high number of industrial solvents and propellants that her body retained had done permanent damage. Even being exposed to common household detergents and cleaners would cause vomiting and respiratory failure. Sounds triggered grand mal seizures, and soaps and shampoos gave her temporary kidney failure. She had to frequently wrap her body in aluminum foil.
Eventually, a specialized house had to be constructed for her in rural North Dakota, with the bedroom serving as a fortified safe room. In her new home, all the air and drinking water had to be filtered to remove impurities. Coming into contact with sunlight made her collapse. Telephones, fax machines, typewriters, refrigerators, televisions, and computers were all too dangerous to use due to giving off chemical fumes too minute for the majority of use to detect. Her diet had to be completely organic. Synthetic and dyed clothing gave her rashes, resulting in her wearing nothing but undyed cotton clothes. Even with all these precautions seizures and blurred vision were still frequent occurrences. Eventually, the act of talking even caused her to seize, becoming intolerant to the sound of her own voice.
Despite this Cindy maintained healthy social contact with the outside world through letters, even having a husband who lived in a cabin a safe 500 feet from her. In 1986 she founded the Environmental Access Research Network, a nonprofit advocacy, and education group for those living with chemical injuries. Building up a vast library of toxicology books, legal journals, government reports, and medical studies, Cindy became an expert on all things related to chemical injuries, having nothing better to do than read all day.
The issue of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) remains very controversial in the literature, with many doctors believing the symptoms to be largely psychological, triggered by intense fears of industrial pollution, technology, and chemicals. MCS remains poorly studied and there is debate as to whether it even exists. Regardless of whether Cindy was suffering from horrible anxiety and delusions or extreme pesticide poisoning, anything that makes a woman have to live in these kinds of conditions deserves to be remembered as a cautionary tale on the morbid fragility of the human mind and body.
Cindy, having an academic background, wanted the condition to be studied through peer-reviewed research, though decades after her death little progress has been made on that front. In 1997, she received the Right Livelihood Award, often called “the alternative Nobel Peace Prize” for her work in “helping others understand and combat the risks posed by toxic chemicals”. In her acceptance speech, read by her husband as she remained in North Dakota, she decried the “unconscionable lack of safety data for the prolific explosion of the more than 75,000 chemicals that have flooded our society since World War II”.
Cindy died of organ failure on June 29, 1999.
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