So what had I eaten that contained glyphosate residues? I knew for sure I hadn't been exposed to any possible source of wheat gluten. It had to have been the surplus produce of some nice neighbor's garden ( https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/07/toxic-tomatoes-or-was-it-peppers.html ). Nice neighbors denied that they'd sprayed any poisons on their garden produce. I believe them, because I saw where fools from the Department of Motor Vehicles had sprayed poison along the state-maintained roads.
Well, yesterday I wanted to send off some hack writing; the cafe that gets good wi-fi reception is closed on Mondays, so I went to McDonald's, which gets unreliable wi-fi reception. It's been a very bad year for mosquitoes. The smell of mosquito repellent was intense. I don't know whether someone freshened up the Deet around the building, or added some sort of mosquito poison to it, but during the afternoon a little summer breeze around the mostly leeward side of the building blasted everybody with enough Deet odor that everyone at all four tables along that wall coughed, as if they'd rehearsed it as some sort of act.
Asian Tiger mosquitoes do bite in the early afternoon, although they're most active in the early morning and late afternoon. Asian Tigers don't dislike fresh cucumbers nearly as much as native mosquitoes do, nor do they dislike Deet unless it's sprayed directly on them. Everybody has become acutely aware of this because so many natural predators on mosquitoes aren't around this year. The mosquito population is checked only by humans.
Well, there are things that help, apart from the poisons that make things worse. Asian Tigers are bold and stupid little animals. If you wave your hand, other mosquitoes know you're watching them and fly away; Asian Tigers will come out of hiding and fly where you can clap your hands on them. And at least, because they're so small, they leave a much smaller mess on your hands than native mosquitoes do.
Yuck? (Buckle your seat belt; any discussion of celiac issues is likely to get yuckier than this.) Yuck. It is sooo much tidier when pretty little animals like songbirds, paper wasps, or dragonflies eat the mosquitoes before they ever get a chance to annoy humans. Nature can't completely control Asian Tigers, which breed in sewers, in towns where people cling to antiquated water-flush toilets; but around my home, where Asian Tigers breed in the marshy borders around the mountain spring, nature does a good job. Even in town the birds and larger insects make a substantial dent in the mosquito population--when humans let them.
I had no plans to join a car pool and didn't want to find out how much Deet I could tolerate, especially seeing that I was still flushing traces of blood down the toilet. After a week? That ought not to happen...
Anyway, I walked out of McDonald's, and soon saw that, no, it hadn't been just one little bell pepper that had made me this sick for this long. In fact I think, by and large, the fresh raw veg might have done more good than harm; I'd actually started feeling well again. But then...the condition of the road on Monday showed why I'd been allowed to feel normal for only a few hours before the sprue reaction came back, worse than before. Fools had poisoned everything, even the grass, along every guardrail on Route 23...
It wasn't only the grass. Dead animals beside a paved road are usually "roadkill," crushed and mangled, and I saw some of those. I saw other creatures, birds and a cat, without a mark on them. Glyphosate always does that. The company denies that it kills animals, but where it's been sprayed you see the bodies. And if the animals that eat the insects or birds that eat the poisoned plants happen to be your pets, most of those animals come home to die, and you see that most of them suffer. Sometimes you can give them a solution of powdered charcoal in water in time to save them. Sometimes not.
I was remembering how charcoal had pulled my cat Heather through last summer's poisoning, but not Heather's foster kittens Boots and Bruno--especially Boots, the world's cuddliest little "Tuxie" kitten. I was thinking how whoever poisoned the flowers along the road deserved to leave this world exactly the same way Boots did. Celiac disease is produced by an almost exclusively Irish gene and has been called the Irish Curse. I'm sure it's inspired many of the Irish poems in the "curse" genre. I know for certain that it inspired one I wrote in that genre.
Glyphosate got that "harmless" label, which it totally does not deserve, because it affects different individuals in different ways. One research paper submitted to the EPA ( linked in https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html ; if you can't follow this link, https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0071 , let me know and I'll post a copy here) summarized the effects on laboratory rabbits as "diarrhea, nasal discharge, and death."
For humans the range of possible effects likewise includes everything from hayfever to death. Celiacs react with celiac sprue, which feels similar to bad "gassid indigestion" except that what feels like passing gas is actually passing a froth of blood from where the poison lacerates the lining of the colon. Probably the most common effect on humans, which can occur in combination with celiac sprue, too, is kidney toxicity, which is probably the first stage of the reaction that often appears as neurotoxicity--at any level from malaise to complete paralysis. One patient was paralyzed for 39 days.
Around the time I noted the first gas-like pain last week, one of my last surviving elders suddenly died. Well, he was old. A deeply decent old gentleman, he'd never let my father convince him that spraying poison was immoral. I'd seen him spray poisons that he insisted only harmed ants or "weeds" many times, and be sicker or weaker the next day. His mind started to go before his body did. These days any memory loss is ascribed to Alzheimer's Disease, and he was only a distant relative--but there's no Alzheimer's Disease in my family, and this elder had noticeably lost more of his memory with every exposure to glyphosate.
I'm still losing blood, still having to push myself to drag slowly, still looking "old" and unhealthy, today. No, this is not from either a tomato or a pepper. Last week's rain washed a lot of the poison out of the air. But not enough. The laptop I use to go online is considerably heavier than either the Toshiba Satellite I dearly loved, which was Internet-free, or the Dell Inspiron I affectionately call the Sickly Snail. It is also considerably lighter than it felt yesterday. Even after the rain I kept shifting it from one shoulder to the other, because it was weighing like a ton of bricks, the way things do when I walk through places where traces of poison linger in the air.
My cell phone rang. It was a neighbor, the one who enjoys off-road driving in an old clunker of a truck. "I'm in Gate City after all. Are you?" I gave him my location information, turned around when I heard the sound of an old clunker approaching a few hundred yards further on, and let him bounce over the deliberately all-but-undrivable private road past the Cat Sanctuary. In the time it would normally have taken me to walk all the way home, I'd walked about two thirds of the way.
"Did you notice all the poisoning along the road," I said. "Fools ought to know by now that it's safer to cut, or dig, or burn, or pave...but they still spray poisons."
"Always do," he shrugged. "The D.M.V. is supposed to keep anything from growing into the road where it interferes with traffic. Spraying is the cheapest way."
"Not if they think about all the people they've injured and all the animals they've killed, it's not."
"Nobody makes them think about that," he said.
It's time we did, Gentle Readers.
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