1. I moved back to CIncinnati in early 2019. I moved into subsidized housing in February. I lived in subsidized housing there for ten months. In late June I called maintenance to repair broken tiles in the bathroom wall. In June of 2019 I came home one day to find caulk all over the floor of the shower. Maintenance had been there while I was gone. This had not dried fully. There was not any reason for there to be caulk on the bathroom floor in the first place. Breathing in caulk fumes while they were drying made me very ill. I felt like I was going to die.
I told building staff about this problem and they acted receptive. A few days later maintenance showed up at my door demanding that they use more chemicals to repair the tiles in the bathroom wall. I refused to let them do the repair because I did not want them to make me sick. The maintenance guy became hostile and tried to force me to let him do the repair. I told him I had an attorney and he told me the landlord had a bigger attorney that would “eat my attorney alive.” He finally left when I would not budge on letting him use more chemicals in the apartment.
2. I was transferred to another apartment in the same building in August of 2019. In September of 2019 I got my car repaired from an independent mechanic. During the visit he got chemical residue on the steering wheel of my car. This had never happened before during a mechanic visit. This is really becoming a growing problem, especially in low income neighborhoods.
3. I filed a reasonable accommodation request that chemicals should not be used in my apartment after this. During a maintenance visit a snake was used to unclog my toilet. For some reason maintenance used oil based lubricant on the actual toilet snake. This is very strange. This ended up leaking onto the floor and contaminating my apartment once again.
4. This was the last straw for me and I decided to move in with someone in Nevada, who also had Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. I really felt responsible for getting myself out of the contaminated apartment. This person was in bad shape and had been chemically injured many years ago. They were allergic to every little thing. I on the other hand am not allergic to laundry detergent, dish soap and things like that. I ended up having to leave this person’s house after only three days because they were so allergic to minute things, like my clothes, that had laundry detergent used on them. I was told by my attorney that in an eviction situation I would have 30 days to stay there after the landlord decided I should leave. This was not true.
One day the person I lived with decided that they were going to come into my room, take my clothes out of the room and put them outside. The person felt that my clothes, which were behind a closed door, were somehow bothering her out in the living room. She felt that because I used laundry detergent when I wash my clothes this somehow was exposing her to chemicals. I do not think this is actually possible. At one point during my stay my roommate also told me that she felt that police broke into her garage on a regular basis and put chemicals in her car. I think that was a delusion.
At this point I had been exposed to chemicals continuously for 4 years. I had a horrible stomach problem that had not been resolved, which started in June of 2013. I cannot describe how ungodly painful it is to have to live with this chronic stomach pain everyday. This has not been simple to resolve due to all of the chemical injuries.
I was quite overwhelmed by the whole situation. On top of all of that I was now being confronted by some freaked out person about something that didn't really make any sense.
I called the police on her because of this. People do not have the right to mess around with my personal property. When police got there they told me they had been out to this house before about a similar issue. Apparently this person had people move in with her before and had also freaked out on them. One thing police did that was harmful in this situation was they pressured the person I was living with to have me move out of the house repeatedly, which she agreed to. I don’t think there was any reason to do that and I do not know that this would have happened if they were not pressuring her.
5. I was then living in my car after this. I went south to get out of the cold weather. It was December in the Carson City, Nevada area. I decided I would go to Slab City, CA where people live in vehicles and RVs. This is about as far south as one can get. I would have been out of the cold. I did not have enough gas money to make it all the way to San Diego. I stayed at a church that took me in at the end of December. They paid for a motel for me to stay in for 2 nights. After that I stayed at a homeless shelter that was 60 miles from Los Angeles. Someone hit my car the day after Christmas in 2019. This caused me broken ribs and whiplash. I was then on foot and had no place to put my personal items, medicine or food.
I have to stay on a specific diet due to having food sensitivities. The homeless shelter I was staying at would not let me bring in my own food, in spite of the fact that I was paying for it. Most of the people there ate what the shelter provided them for free. I had to sneak in vegan food and medicine for 2.5 months in a book bag like it was narcotics. I went back to Cincinnati in February of 2020 because I could not afford to live anywhere in California on social security money. It was $1,200 there for a studio or one bedroom apartment.
- In subsidized housing one out of five apartments I have lived in have been contaminated. One was already contaminated before I moved in. Three were contaminated during maintenance visits.
- When a person is on disability benefits there are few if any places one can afford to live in. Some of the places that are affordable for disabled people are not available because they have mandatory minimum income limits that are too high. This causes disabled people to become homeless or to live in unsafe environments. This creates a death trap for disabled people. In many areas every foot of land is defined by government, corporations or is residential.
- When disabled people end up in homeless shelters they cannot control their diet and sleep schedule like they need to. Many homeless shelters are similar to prisons in some ways.
- Of the chemical exposures I have experienced, I think that chemical residue exposures would harm any person. Chemical injury harms one’s brain, nervous system, liver, intestines, lymph nodes and other organ systems. Chemical injury is a very burdensome problem for one to have to say the least. Some people think Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is “all in the mind.” This is simply not true. I think MCS is caused by internal health problems. Some chemicals can be tolerated and some should not be tolerated by anyone. People have died from chemical injury.
- From 2001-2013 I lived in one bedroom and studio apartments in Ohio, Indiana and Northern Kentucky. It is very uncommon for maintenance or the landlord to expose residents to harmful chemicals or cause accidents during maintenance visits. This has become more common and is especially common in subsidized housing in Ohio.
(Blogger has messed up my font size in some of this post)
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