I first started developing symptoms of multiple chemical sensitivity in 1984 after I was exposed to sterilizing chemicals

in the hospital where I trained as a registered nurse. With intermittent brain fog and memory problems, I wondered why I was suddenly too tired to get out of bed in the mornings. The skin rash and itching were so severe, at night I would scratch myself until I bled. At the same time I started to get severe depression.

A few years later when I first heard of environmental illness with people becoming allergic to modern chemicals, I thought “No, that can’t be right. The government regulates those chemicals very closely”. How naïve was I?

Things got worse in the late 1980’s when I started working in a dialysis unit where formaldehyde was used to clean the kidney machines. Sometimes at work I would be so brain fogged I was almost unconscious on my feet. I left that job after only six months but there was no escape from the chemicals. In 1990, just after I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, I went nursing for a couple of years in the Middle East, where the room I slept in was sprayed every month with pesticide. Unsurprisingly, my symptoms got worse and I had to move on.

The crisis point came when I started working in a newly constructed, poorly ventilated health centre in London – the place stank constantly of building and renovating chemicals. After nine months I could barely walk and my chemical sensitivity had become severe, particularly to things like new carpets and vehicle exhaust.

Desperately ill and with no support, I was forced to return to Australia to live on isolated Kangaroo Island with my sister. She had been seriously disabled with MCS after exposure to chlorpyrifos pesticide used to treat household termites. Her husband had built a chemical free house on the island, which became my refuge for six months until I was well enough to return to the mainland.

I managed to go back to work for another six years but the final insult came in 2000 when I was exposed to organophosphate pesticides used by the South Australian state government to control fruit fly in the suburbs of Adelaide. It was then that I had to give up working due to disabling musculoskeletal pains together with all the other symptoms that had been getting worse over the years. At the same time I developed a severe sensitivity to Roundup herbicide, which is sprayed everywhere by local government contractors to control weeds in suburban streets. Every time I was exposed to Roundup I would lose tolerance for chemicals that I had previously tolerated and then develop seriously life-threatening symptoms. In recent years it has been a nightmare trying to avoid herbicide.

In 2001 I decided that if I didn’t start fighting back against the chemical onslaught I might just as well lay down and die. So, together with a small group of other people with MCS, we formed the South Australian Task Force on MCS to respond to the public health crisis of chemical injury and have been lobbying for recognition of the problem ever since. There is huge resistance from governments and industries that are responsible for the negligence but we are making slow progress.