The miracle drug that backfired

 

 

The tragic story of a woman with severe multiple chemical sensitivity who was initially helped greatly by a drug, but then it backfired on her.

 

Keywords:    Neurontin, gabapentin, multiple chemical sensitivity, MCS, environmental illness, housing, drugs, financial distress, suicide

 

 

Linda J. lived in small-town Indiana when she got sick with MCS. It became real bad and there were no doctors who could help. She raised some money and traveled to Dallas to see Dr. William Rea, the top specialist in this field.

 

Rea wasn’t able to help much, especially within Linda’s meager budget and health insurance. But she found she felt better living in an MCS camp outside Seagoville, southeast of Dallas, where she lived in a modified travel trailer. That was much better that the mobile home back in Indiana, so she stayed there for a couple of years, hoping the clean air would help.

 

Then she heard about another physician in Dallas who treated MCS with the drug Neurontin (gabapentin). He prescribed it in very strong doses, much higher than normal prescription strength. Stories of people who had become virtually cured by this drug started to circulate.

 

Linda went to this doctor, got the prescription, and it worked splendidly. Her MCS was gone, as long as she kept taking the drug.

 

She moved back to Indiana and lived the normal American lifestyle with all the toxic chemicals. They no longer bothered her at all.

 

It went well for a few years, but then the drug stopped working. All her usual MCS symptoms came back again. And she was now both allergic to the drug, and addicted to it at the same time.

 

She now also had seizures and anxiety attacks, and electrical hypersensitivity (EHS). Whether this was caused by the drug, or from living the toxic lifestyle while still having MCS, is unknown. The drug may simply have been symptom treatment and not actually helping her MCS.

 

In 2001 she went down to Dallas again, but the doctor who prescribed the drug had retired. Linda was not the first person where the drug backfired like that, which may have encouraged him to retire.

 

Dr. Rea helped her to slowly get off the drug that she had become addicted to. It took a long time, perhaps a year.

 

Linda’s finances were not good; she had to live in the cheapest place she could find. That was an MCS rooming house in the town of Seagoville, where someone who had MCS rented out three bedrooms.

 

Linda took the bedroom nobody else wanted, so she got a discount. The room had been painted with a supposedly non-toxic paint, but it stunk for years. Linda made the room sort-of work by covering all the walls with a non-toxic plastic to seal in the fumes. If you closed the door fast, the sudden change in air pressure made the plastic flap.

 

After about a year in Dallas, she was able to buy an old Airstream camping trailer that was modified for people with environmental illnesses. The bathroom, kitchen, cabinets, and interior walls had been removed, so it was just a room on wheels.

 

The previous owner had died. The widower sold it at a bargain price to get rid of it. Linda parked the trailer in the yard behind the rooming house. There were no hookups for electricity, sewage or water. She used a shared bathroom in the house. The Airstream was better for her, both chemically and electrically, and she now had a lower rent.

 

Linda’s Airstream in the yard of the rooming house in 2002.

 

Linda still continued to get worse. There were more seizures. Many times she sat in a chair rocking back and forth. The anxieties got worse too. It didn’t help that her husband divorced her, and her finances got even worse. Going back to Indiana was no longer an option.

 

On a spring day in 2003, she put on lipstick and was picked up by a taxi. This unusual behavior greatly puzzled the other people at the rooming house.

 

She was gone less than an hour, and came back by taxi. We think she went to the pawnshop in Seagoville, which had a large selection of firearms.

 

That night she shot herself, lying on the bed in her Airstream. She was discovered the next day.

 

The workplace challenge

I knew Linda while she lived at that rooming house, and saw the mess in the Airstream after her body was removed.

 

Linda was always kind and friendly to other people, she deserved a better life than she had.

 

I knew one other person whose MCS went into remission once she started on Neurontin. She also used the super-high doses. She then moved back to New York and resumed her prior life for some years, until the drug stopped working. She again had to flee the big city for the desert of Arizona, in worse shape than before. After a few years, she too committed suicide.

 

Apparently, this happened to other people, though I don’t know them personally. I don’t think they committed suicide. Doctors no longer prescribe Neurontin for MCS, at least not in those high doses. I don’t know what the doses actually were.

 

 

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