Toxins and Multiple Sclerosis

A few years ago my wife's MS seemed to be progressing and causing her more issues. Up until that time, she would have problems for short periods of time and then have longer periods of remission. We were unsure of what to do so we started to ask our doctors and others that we trusted about this situation. Everyone had a different opinion, but our family's advice was the hardest to choke down. We have quite a few medical professionals in our immediate family, and we have dealt with everything from Cancer to Lupus to Alzheimer. Our families felt like we should prepare for the worst and start planning for her to have more issues and for her health to decline. We just couldn't accept that, and decided to take action and make some tough decisions.

We were living in an area at the time that had heavy oilfield drilling. I had spoken with a few area doctors that felt like the toxicity in the air surrounding the city we lived in could be causing a lot of our issues. That kinda made sense, and I started checking out what type of toxins were being pumped into the air. The EPA has a website that records the worst air pollution in all major cities in the US. I started digging into the records, and the city we lived in had high concentrations of Lead, Arsenic, Styrene and other toxic gases that were byproducts of the oilfield industry. Most of our friends thought we were looney to think the air could be causing the issue, but we knew that something was affecting my wife's health and it wasn't because the disease was progressing.

After a year and a half of trying to figure out what was causing the problem we decided to move back to an area where we knew my wife did well with her MS. Within weeks my wife's health started getting better, and we knew then that something was causing issues with her MS in the other city. There was one more thing we felt like could have caused some problems. The area we lived in was once a country club, and the houses were older and built sometime in the 1950's. We found out that the house across the street had black mold at one point, so we have wondered if our house had some kind of mold or other problem. We had cleaned the house extensively before we moved in, but there could have been mold in the walls and we would have never known. So, we are still unsure if there was any kind of mold or other problem with the house we lived in.

My wife's health has continued to improve since we moved, and now we know for sure that it was something either in our past house or the air quality. There really isn't a way for us to know now, but it is amazing how her health can be affected by things that we can neither see or know is hurting her. We loved the city we lived in, and wouldn't mind moving back if her health would hold up. We are now much more careful about picking environments where we live and houses that we live in. There are now self tests you can perform in your home to check for mold, and I wish we would have known about those at the time, but we will always wonder what hurt her there. Multiple Sclerosis is a weird disease in that it can change so quickly and without warning. We would move again if we felt like there were reasons justifying it, but for now, we have learned our lesson about checking air quality where we live. We won't go blindly into any new places without checking for toxins and other issues so that we can minimize the risks of her MS acting up. The scary thing was that our doctors and family were ready to start full on drug treatments because they just knew that her MS was getting worse because of her age. I guess it just shows you that the only person that really knows is the MS sufferer and that they are the only ones that can listen to their bodies and understand what is going on.