by Alan Bell
• • •
How ironic: after searching all over America, Dr. Albert Robbins, the man designated to solve my medical mystery, was located less than a half hour’s drive from my house.
His office building resembled a miniature two-story hospital from the outside, but inside, it looked nothing like any hospital I’d ever seen. Air purifiers hummed, and there was no carpeting anywhere. I checked in at the front desk and was sent upstairs to the sparsest, whitest, most sterile office I’d ever seen in my life.
Dr. Robbins was a doctor of osteopathic medicine. He had a master’s degree in public health and was also an allergy and environmental health specialist. He shook my hand in the exam room and looked me over with his piercing eyes as he asked about my medical history.
I rattled off the high and low points of my odyssey and handed him the test results I’d collected. My medical file was a giant cement block of papers, but Dr. Robbins zeroed right in on my environmental history rather than the multitude of test results in his hands.
“Tell me about when you were a little kid,” he began. “Where did you grow up? Were you ever exposed to any pesticides?”
I told him how, as children, my brother, sister, and I loved riding through the sweet-smelling mist of pesticides sprayed by mosquito abatement trucks as they cruised through our family’s suburban neighborhood near the Everglades.
Dr. Robbins also asked about my house and car, as well as the buildings I’d worked in through the years. He asked question after question, and I dutifully answered each one as thoroughly as I could. His mind busily processed and analyzed the data I was feeding him. He was connecting dots I couldn’t even see, much the way I did as a lawyer presented with a challenging legal case.
Finally, I stopped him. “Come on, why are you asking me all this stuff? Let’s get on with the testing or whatever you’re going to do.”
At that, Dr. Robbins leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “I’m not going to order any tests,” he said. “You’ve had enough of them. Besides, I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Nobody had ever said anything like this to me before. “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“You have an environmental illness brought on by ‘sick building syndrome.’”
“What? What’s that?”
“In simplest terms, the building you were working in made you sick,” he said. “Certain buildings are toxic environments.”
Chemicals commonly found in buildings can affect individuals in a variety of ways, he explained, depending on factors relating to genetics and length of exposure. “Over time, cumulative exposures can reach a threshold that will injure the human body by weakening the immune and nervous systems.”
My mind was racing to keep up, but I wanted to shut out his words because I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing.
“So why did all of the other doctors I’ve seen tell me I have chronic fatigue syndrome, anemia, and Epstein-Barr virus?” I challenged him.
Dr. Robbins shrugged. “Your body is in overdrive because your immune and nervous systems are compromised. But those viruses aren’t the things making you sick. It’s the other way around: your body can no longer defend itself against viruses like Epstein-Barr because it’s injured.”
Most people exposed to these viruses don’t become ill, “because their immune systems are strong,” he continued. “Your body was injured by exposure to toxic chemicals inside your office building, and this injury weakened your immune system to the point where your body is no longer capable of defending itself against other environmental exposures. In other words, you have become hypersensitive to various things, including molds, pollen, foods, and chemicals found in everyday products and environments. Anything from chlorine to deodorant is enough to set you off.”
This all sounded impossible to me. Yet a part of my brain was analyzing the evidence along with him. Before this moment, I hadn’t restricted any of my activities: not my diet, not my outings to hotels, and not my brand-new car rentals. What if Dr. Robbins was right and I was reacting to the chemicals in the environment?
No. This was too crazy.
Dr. Robbins continued explaining his diagnosis to me, saying I’d been in a chronic state of illness, so my reactions to these things were masked over. But over time, I had become hypersensitive to most chemicals found in our environment. That’s why I felt like a rookie soldier suddenly dropped into the middle of a jungle war zone, with hidden adversaries shooting at me from all directions. I didn’t know where the bullets were coming from. I only knew I had to run for my life.
I thought of that brand-new car smell I’d loved in my Z, and the home Susan and I built in the fancy Coral Springs development. Our home was filled with the smells of new paint, new carpet, and fresh building materials. Was my car toxic to me? Was my house? It couldn’t be true!
As Dr. Robbins continued to quiz me, I answered his questions with an eerie sense of dread. I told him about the various things I’d noticed, like how walking past a swimming pool caused me to start wheezing; how I’d passed out when pesticides were sprayed around my treadmill; and the many times when perfume or cologne scents were so overpowering, they caused me to double over in pain.
If Dr. Robbins was correct, then I was like one of those canaries in the coal mines. If dangerous gases like carbon monoxide accumulated in the mine, the birds would keel over and the miners would know to exit the mine before they died from exposure to the same dangerous chemicals. Was I that canary for everyone around me, everywhere I went?
As we continued talking, I recalled how, during my time as a prosecutor, I’d moved to a different part of the courthouse and started getting flu-like symptoms. When I asked to be moved back to my old office, the symptoms went away soon afterward. Had my prior exposure to pesticides, molds, and other toxic chemicals made me more susceptible to the chemicals in the sealed environment of 110 Tower?
No. That was completely and totally insane. Period.
“I can’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head as Dr. Robbins walked me out of his office. “It’s impossible. The government would never approve dangerous chemicals in building materials. Besides, if what you’re saying is true, other people working there would have gotten sick, right?”
“There is no government regulation of most chemicals used in building products, only in foods and drugs,” he countered. “And there probably are other colleagues who got sick. They just may not be as disabled as you are. It is true. I’m sorry.” Dr. Robbins offered me a little smile. “By the way, Alan, you’re wearing cologne and it’s making me sick.” He pointed to the sign on the front desk saying, Please, no perfumes or colognes.
“What’s that about?” I asked. “I wear this stuff every day.”
“It isn’t helping you,” Dr. Robbins said. “In fact, your cologne is aggravating your condition.”
“So what will help? What’s the cure?”
“There isn’t one, I’m afraid,” Dr. Robbins said. “Your body has been permanently injured. Now you must learn to live with these injuries and do your best to keep the symptoms at bay.”
“How do I do that?” I asked desperately, ready to grasp at any straw.
“I can work with you here to stabilize you, but because your case is so extreme, you should go to the Environmental Health Center in Dallas,” he said. “I know of a doctor there, William Rea, who’s the top guy in this field.”
Dr. Robbins explained that Dr. Rea was trained as a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon. He’d developed a strong interest in the environmental aspects of health and disease, which led him to found the Environmental Health Center. Dr. Rea, he said, would identify what specific environmental chemicals were triggering my symptoms.
“You’ll have to stay away from those chemicals,” he added. “All of them.”
“Stay away from them?” I echoed. My mind was reeling. “How?”
“By living your life in a radically different way,
” Dr. Robbins said. “Basically, you have to steer clear of anything in the environment that can trigger your body’s reactions. That means you must pay attention to how your body responds to different stimuli, so you’re aware of the causes and effects different chemicals have on your body. For starters, get rid of your bed and buy an organic cotton mattress. Remove any furniture made out of particleboard. You can no longer live the way other people do, Alan. This is going to call for a radically different lifestyle, one where you live in an environment that’s virtually chemical-free.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, stunned. “That’s too much. My wife will never tolerate it. And what would be the point, anyway, if you’re saying there’s no cure for this whatever-you-call-it, this environmental illness?”
“I know it won’t be easy, but the point is to keep you alive,” Dr. Robbins said. “We can hope your body will heal itself a little over time, but you’ll always be sick. You simply must accept that you’re permanently injured from toxic exposure.”
• • •
I went home feeling angry, disheartened, and confused. My prosecutor’s skepticism kicked in again, just as it had when Dr. Kirkpatrick suggested I’d been the victim of some kind of revenge poisoning by a criminal I had prosecuted in the past. It defied logic that there were things in the environment I was reacting to that nobody else even noticed.
Plus, as I’d told Dr. Robbins, I didn’t believe for one second that our government would allow people to be subjected to poisons. If these buildings were so dangerous, then surely experts would have identified the problem and people wouldn’t be allowed to work or live in them.
Most of all, I refused to accept that there was no cure. According to Dr. Robbins, this thing was a death sentence unless you lived in a sterile bubble for the rest of your life. I couldn’t swallow that idea. Not with my wife and Ashlee depending on me. Not with my whole life to live.
I wanted to think Dr. Robbins was a quack like that crazy judge’s assistant who had claimed the courthouse and 110 Tower were making people sick. How dare he tell me I was going to be like this forever? And how could he have the audacity to take money from patients he couldn’t cure, especially when he couldn’t cure himself enough to even tolerate my cologne?
If I was skeptical of the diagnosis, Susan was downright furious. She refused to believe there was any truth in what Dr. Robbins said.
“I don’t buy it,” she said flatly. “There’s just no way that you could be hypersensitive to so many things in the environment. What about all of those other doctors you went to? They never said anything like this. Nope, I just don’t buy it. That guy’s a nut.”
With her blessing, I returned to the doctor I’d seen at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. When he called me into his office, I said, “Look, you told me that if I rested, this thing would go away, but it hasn’t.”
I went on to describe my visit to Dr. Robbins and his bizarre diagnosis. “You never mentioned this possibility to me,” I said. “Why not?”
He sighed. “Look, this is a controversial diagnosis, Alan,” he said. “There’s no proof that multiple chemical sensitivity exists. There are three camps of doctors. The first group is the majority who don’t believe the diagnosis is real. The second group consists of quacks who prey on unfortunate patients by putting crazy ideas in their heads about things that don’t exist.”
“The third camp,” he explained, “is an emerging group of doctors who believe there are, indeed, cases of human environmental poisoning. This poisoning causes a breakdown of the immune and nervous systems, rendering certain people defenseless against diseases that might have otherwise been contained—even cancer.”
I was so tense by now that I could hardly breathe. “So what’s the Mayo Clinic’s position?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “The truth is, nobody really knows about this stuff yet. But if this Dr. Robbins is telling you that he might be able to help, what do you have to lose by following his advice? We don’t know what else to do for you. Medicine is an art, not a science, and medicine is archaic. We know about 1 percent of what’s really going on in the human body. In fifty years, they’ll look at us as practicing medicine in the Dark Ages.”
I went back home and sank into an even darker place. A big part of me still wanted to reject everything I’d heard. I had no idea where to turn next.
Then my detective buddy, Ben, called me. We hadn’t spoken in months; I perked up at the sound of his voice saying, “Hey, Alan. I’ve got something interesting to tell you.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Well, I didn’t find anybody who wanted to poison you, but listen to this. There’s a whole list of people who got sick while they were working in that 110 Tower building. Dozens and dozens of ’em! One judge’s daughter even died.” (She was a young lawyer working on the floor below me, who was suddenly stricken with a crippling respiratory ailment.) “Think maybe the building could have made you sick?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Thanks for telling me.”
We hung up. I pressed a hand against my eyes, as if I could block out the truth. The last thing I wanted to sign up for was a school of thought dooming me to suffer from these crazy symptoms forever. But, like it or not, if Ben said dozens of people in my building were sick, then what choice did I have but to accept my plight?
If I were in court prosecuting a murder, I’d call this the “smoking gun”: here was solid evidence. I couldn’t keep my head buried in the sand any longer. I had been injured, probably permanently, by the toxins in my fancy office at 110 Tower.
Only now did I remember another omen I’d ignored: a conversation I’d overheard soon after I started working at 110 Tower. I was in the elevator of that building with a friend of mine whose father was a judge. “Where are you off to?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m getting out of here,” she said. “Something about this building is making me sick.”
At the time, I thought she was delusional. I had smiled politely and changed the topic. Now, I began wondering if things might have been different for me if I had listened to her and that judge’s assistant, and paid better attention to the signals my own body was sending every time I worked at 110 Tower.
By now, it was 1991, and my condition had deteriorated to the point where I could no longer work. I often had trouble breathing, was in almost constant pain, and had to sleep many hours each day. Other than being with my daughter, the joy in my life was slipping away. I’d been sick for two years, and was getting worse by the day. I knew the Mayo Clinic doctor was right about one thing: I didn’t have much to lose by letting Dr. Robbins treat me, because I’d lost nearly everything already. I was fighting for my life.
• • •
Dr. Robbins did his best to stabilize my health in the coming weeks. He gave me immunotherapy and vitamin injections, instructed me to sit in saunas to sweat out toxins, told me to eat organic foods, and made it clear that I wasn’t to go near perfumes and most chemicals.
He also gave me books to read. Ever the diligent researcher, I read them all. Nothing I learned made me feel any better.
I learned, for instance, that during the energy crisis in the 1970s, many new homes, schools, and office buildings were sealed to contain energy costs. That meant toxic chemicals outgassing from building materials were sealed inside as well. As the awareness of this brand-new “sick building” syndrome grew, so did the number of people complaining of symptoms brought on by exposure to various toxins in their home and work environments.
Perhaps the most ironic of these cases involved the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waterside Mall headquarters in southwest Washington. In this complex, the windows didn’t open and there were signs warning of asbestos fibers in the ceiling. Many of the 5,500 employees at the EPA headquarters complained of symptoms like mine: headaches, rashes, nausea, fatigue, blurred vision, chills, sneezing, fever, irritability, forgetfulness, dizziness, and burning sensatio
ns in their throats, ears, eyes, and chest.
When surveyed, many of those affected believed their health problems were caused by the building. The EPA ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrading the air-handling systems and tearing out the building’s new carpeting, which contained toxic adhesives.
“Sick building syndrome,” though a relatively unscientific term, was becoming more commonplace when describing patterns of health symptoms associated with lousy indoor air quality in workplaces, schools, homes, and other buildings. Poor air quality is caused by inferior ventilation and many pollutants, including insulation, formaldehyde from pressed-wood products, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) seeping out of building materials, paints, copying machines, carpets, and adhesives, among other things. Unhealthy air is also caused by mold and other biological contaminants from dirty ventilation systems or water-damaged carpets, ceilings, or walls, as well as radon, pesticides, and combustion by-products.
It’s challenging for victims to prove their claims involving “sick buildings,” however, because it’s difficult to specifically pinpoint, link, and prove that exposure to specific toxins definitively caused their various health complaints.
If I’d been well enough, I would have put my skills as a prosecutor to work, investigating each sick individual in 110 Tower to prove the building was responsible for our plight. But I was now in survival mode and barely hanging on. All I could do was feel sorry for these other people, and somewhat grateful that maybe I wasn’t completely delusional.
It would be another decade before the news would break that the Broward County Courthouse I had worked in was also a sick building, inundated with toxic black mold. Judges, police officers, clerks, administrators, and attorneys all fell ill while working there. Certain judges who spent a lot of hours in the building became disabled.
It was starting to look like everything Dr. Robbins told me was true.
• • •
Despite Dr. Robbins’s efforts to stabilize my health, my condition continued to deteriorate. By 1992, I could barely tolerate a trip to the playground with Ashlee. Nonetheless, sometimes I went, simply to be with her somewhere other than inside my grim, claustrophobic world, which consisted mostly of my couch and bed. Just seeing the ice-cream man show up at the playground in his truck, playing that familiar chiming music, and watching my little girl grin as a Popsicle dripped bright colors down her fingers brought a smile to my face. But these joyful moments were becoming increasingly rare. Each drained what little energy I had, taking me days to recover to my baseline: a flu-like state of aching joints, headaches, wheezing, and fatigue.