Mystery Solved?

I have been experiencing some strange health issues ever since school started this fall. I have had painful joints, aching muscles, dizziness, brain fog, low blood pressure, headaches, etc. I have been through some testing and, naturally, nothing is wrong with me. It took me a while to realize that I felt pretty good until I arrived at work in the morning. It took me until last Wednesday to realize that I only feel like absolute shit when I am in the English classroom. I knew that I felt terrible in the mornings. While sitting there, the muscles in my legs would be burning in pain. Just sitting still my head was spinning. There was a fatigue that seemed to take over my entire body. I couldn't think straight. The kids would come to me for grammar help and I didn't know what to do. I would sometimes say the wrong words...my mouth would open to say one thing and something random would come out. Or I would get frustrated because they weren't listening and they would all insist that I said something else totally different. That part was a little unnerving. In the middle of the day, I would feel better, only to feel like crap again the last hour of the day, which was again in the English room.

I also get muscle twitches anywhere on my body. One night Grace and I had a lot of entertainment just watching my thumb twitch uncontrollably.

I thought maybe there was some sort of mold thing going on, and maybe I have a mold allergy. I approached the teacher and told her all about it. With wide eyes, she (and another teacher sitting near her) gasped. They had heard all this before. "You HAVE to talk to the principal," they said. "That sounds like dirty electricity."

The principal has a sister who years ago suffered many health problems, and underwent thousands of dollars of medical testing. They thought she had MS. She was a teacher, and she felt fine during the summer, then got sick when she returned in the fall. The health department declared there was a mold problem in her school, and they spent thousands of dollars to clean it up. It didn't help. Finally someone said there was a problem with the electricity. The whole school installed filters to reduce the amount of "dirty electricity" or stray voltage in the schools. She has been fine ever since.

She and I emailed a couple of times and I talked to her on the phone yesterday. Her experience is almost identical to mine. There is such a thing as Electromagnetic Sensitivity. She travels around talking to people about her experience. Some people are more sensitive to the electrical waves. In the back of the English room, I sit next to three computers, a printer/copier/scanner, and a stereo. I have noticed also feeling bad next to laptops, which are supposedly worse than desktops.

This sort of thing is not widely accepted by the medical community. How could it be? There's no pill they can give you for it. It is certainly nothing new, although I had never heard of it before. Any scientist knows that waves above a certain level can have an affect on the human body. There are farmers that have problems with their cows because of stray voltage in the barns. In Sweden it is widely recognized as a disability. This web site, and others like it, have a ton of information.

Several things are going through my mind these past few days:

-Could this really be the answer?

-If so, why am I just feeling this now?

-Will anyone (besides the principal) believe me?

-Would the school spend thousands of dollars to install the filters throughout the school in order to help me with some disorder that may or may not be real in this terrible economic time when the school has no money, is operating on a deficit, and the state is taking more money away from them this year for a paraprofessional that they could easily replace?

-Do I care enough about the job to fight for it?

-Should I invest the money to put these filters in my home? ($25-$30 each - 15-20 needed)

-The English room? Seriously?

I have been sick this weekend with a cold/flu thing. I am home today because of this, and also because I have no daycare at all for Grace due to all the sickness going around. This lady is getting me a meter so I can check out my home and the school for high levels. I will get it when I go back to school.

Side note- This instantly made me think of a Stephen King short story I read years ago, "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet." It was pretty creepy, because the guy goes completely insane. He is a writer, and he gets to know this other writer who honestly believes that the ideas for his stories come from a little creature in his typewriter called a fornit. This fornit does not do well around electricity. This guy goes crazy and unplugs everything in his house because the electricity messes up his mind and he can't think. It seemed so crazy at the time... ;)