I could say a ton about “HT,” but suffice it to say that ours spread like wildfire, caused burning and other “HT symptoms,” but logic, experience, and circumstances mean that it appears to be crystalline DDT from old buildings, used in those buildings before 1972. It does not break down inside a building, because it needs sunlight and/or soil microbes to do so.
This cross-contamination of DDT happened because Steve got a new job in town. Within the first week, I started coughing and coughing and coughing, but I thought “well he needs a job, I’ll just cough.” But then one morning, I woke up and couldn’t bear weight. My nerves and leg muscles were just gone. Steve had to push me to the bathroom in a wheeled office chair for two weeks. As I experimented in the next days, I would hang my legs over the edge of the bed. Sometimes one or both legs were paralyzed, sometimes I could swing one or both of them one way but not the other way. My left leg turned purple for a while, and at one point, I threw up every day for two months in a row. Everything took so long to figure out, but one day we sadly realized all our garden produce (and the small chest freezer we put it in) had gotten contaminated because we had set the lovely garden produce in the contaminated kitchen for too long. Every time I ate it, I threw up. One day I was nearly in agony throwing up, pain, etc. and basically feeling like I was going to die or wanted to. Steve looked at me and said “this is withdrawal.” And it was. The closest description I could find online to what I experienced was withdrawal from heroin. I found out later that this could absolutely be withdrawal from DDT. This was after Steve had quit going to that old building and even other old buildings in town. At some point in there, we obviously realized Steve couldn’t work in that old building anymore. We were slightly panicked until the boss, a guy from our new church, said “hey let me get you a computer, and you can work from home.” Wow!
Through much experimentation, we slowly figured things out. At first, Nathan had to mop my room every single night so I could sleep. In this way, we figured out the DDT would come off the tile with just water and paper towel. We also found that not only was it contaminating the whole house all the time everywhere, through the pets and our using stuff for life, but also I appeared to be self-contaminating it through my skin and through my breath. The rest of the house was getting better, but for a while we still had to wash my curtains (and my curtains only) every day. At some point I finally stopped self-contaminating, basically I think because of treating my liver. https://www.blackhillspicturebooks.com/2022/07/14/my-liver-treatment/
We could tell I was no longer self-contaminating because I could sleep even with curtains not washed and floor not mopped. But I started to get increased symptoms when I wouldn’t eat enough and/or did too much activity for the calorie intake. It was my own body trying to detox, and the stuff apparently was coming out of my fat cells. They body apparently processes DDT into DDE, which is even more toxic than DDT. Ugh. I could usually make the muscle pain stop or reduce greatly by eating a food that binds toxicants in the body: whole grains, nuts, or coconut meat. It worked even better if the snack included some fat (whole grain bread with either butter and/or eggs). Eventually, I stayed in a cabin while Steve and my mom cleaned the house again. They had tried cleaning all this up before, but after the cleaning, I came home and still got aphasia, ophthalmic migraines, exhaustion, and intermittent nerve problems with my legs. So we realized we needed something besides just cleaning. What could we do? We realized that this substance would pass back and forth, it would go through Ziploc bags (the bag would be fine, but the food inside would make me throw up), so we finally realized we would need to replace some things. So I started making priority lists:
1) Amazon wishlist
2) Walmart list
3) Nathan’s mattress
4) Winter clothes
5) Select school books
6) Clothes storage
But how were we going to do all this? After losing our mold house in Indiana, most of our stuff, trying to survive before we built this house, and building this house, we had no savings. Most of our extended family was stretched thin trying to help us because we had no job income for ten years, because Sarah and I needed too much caregiving, etc. So how would we even start? So final on the list, instead of putting number seven I wrote down:
Miracle) Storage for towels
Within two weeks, we got a call from my brother-in-law. He and my sister still work at the church/school where I started second grade and where my father (Nick Ittzes) was pastor for many years. Some guy had come to them and said “Nick Ittzes performed my and my wife’s wedding, and I would like this to go to Christa Upton’s family.” He handed my brother-in-law an envelope containing almost $5,ooo cash. It was enough for all seven lists (including “Miracle)” PLUS a new refrigerator, which we quickly found out was needed. We put the old refrigerator outside to sell, because the average person in town would already be experiencing far more DDT than could possibly be in this one fridge.
One day, I walked around the corner near the old fridge, and started to collapse because it hit my nerves again and I couldn’t bear weight. Good thing I was holding onto Steve or I would have fallen and could have broken a bone.
Later, Steve’s sister came for several weeks to help us continue getting the DDT out of here, put together the metal storage units, and allow Steve to continue working for an income despite the chaos and Sarah’s and my many needs. Since then, I have never collapsed or gone paralyzed again, and the nerve symptoms (burning, zapping, neuropathy) have been getting better, and it’s been a long time since I’ve coughed or thrown up. I still have symptoms, but again they come when I overdo, don’t eat enough, or am around too many chemicals (which I think cause my liver to “back up,” like the time we went out for our youngest’s birthday). The house is excellent again, and we believe the key has been “segregation” of DDT-contaminated items and/or clean items into metal. A side benefit of metal storage is that during COVID, less sanitizer spread around because we put groceries away directly into the food monster (see video for what a food monster is, LOL).
Now, the side benefit is less scent in the air from groceries from everywhere. I don’t have much trouble with scent anymore, but the accumulation potentially affecting my liver is still far less with all the metal storage. And one of my kids still reacts to scent.
Christa Upton Edgemont, SD 57735
