Post by Lisa Petrison on Nov 16, 2011 12:36:28 GMT -5
For much of my illness with "active" CFS, I traveled quite frequently by airplane.
I always found this quite stressful, more than almost anything else that I did. I continued to do it for work, and because I liked traveling to places (perhaps mostly to get away from my moldy home), but it certainly was exhausting.
Generally I would take a small amount of Cortef before the trip. This seemed to keep my adrenals from overextending pushing too hard and causing as much of a crash afterwards. (If I waited until after the trip and then took the Cortef, it didn't help at all. My feeling was that the adrenals produce all kinds of things besides cortisol, and can't make any of them once they're crashed.)
I've only traveled a couple of times by air since pursuing mold avoidance, both in my first year (2008).
One was to NYC. I actually did okay on the trip there and felt good once I arrived, but then I crashed a few days into the trip. (I got a Vitamin C IV and think that the dosage may have been too high, causing a Lyme die-off.) I was sick until returning to Chicago and beyond.
Another was to Colorado. I flew from Chicago to Denver to Grand Junction and felt really awful. I was in the mountains in Colorado for a month after that. It took me a few days to recover, and then I felt really good.
Going back to Chicago after getting really clear (including seeing Erik), I realized the Grand Junction airport was really moldy. The Denver airport seemed a little better. The plane rides were really miserable. I was a mess when I arrived in Chicago, and then I started hyperreacting to everything. (I don't think the hyperreacting was from the airplane trip though -- more from getting clear for the first time ever and prompting intensification response.)
There are a variety of reasons I haven't flown since. I fear not having a good place to stay, like traveling around in my RV, and don't have as much money to waste as I used to. But a good part of it is that I'm afraid of what the air travel will do to me.
Perhaps this is going too far. Maybe if I went to (say) the Caribbean, the positive effects on my health would easily outweigh the negative effects of the travel. But I'm not sure.
My husband has hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles in his account, so maybe it's foolish of me not to go to a cheap Caribbean island just to try it out.
I wonder what it is that makes air travel so hard on me. Here are a couple of articles by Erik Johnson and Khaly Castle on this topic.
www.ecohustler.co.uk/2011/10/17/f....toxic-syndrome/
cfsuntied.com/blog2/2011/09/21/the-bleed/
Read more: locationseffect.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=locations&thread=237&page=1#ixzz1dtKPZKyn
I always found this quite stressful, more than almost anything else that I did. I continued to do it for work, and because I liked traveling to places (perhaps mostly to get away from my moldy home), but it certainly was exhausting.
Generally I would take a small amount of Cortef before the trip. This seemed to keep my adrenals from overextending pushing too hard and causing as much of a crash afterwards. (If I waited until after the trip and then took the Cortef, it didn't help at all. My feeling was that the adrenals produce all kinds of things besides cortisol, and can't make any of them once they're crashed.)
I've only traveled a couple of times by air since pursuing mold avoidance, both in my first year (2008).
One was to NYC. I actually did okay on the trip there and felt good once I arrived, but then I crashed a few days into the trip. (I got a Vitamin C IV and think that the dosage may have been too high, causing a Lyme die-off.) I was sick until returning to Chicago and beyond.
Another was to Colorado. I flew from Chicago to Denver to Grand Junction and felt really awful. I was in the mountains in Colorado for a month after that. It took me a few days to recover, and then I felt really good.
Going back to Chicago after getting really clear (including seeing Erik), I realized the Grand Junction airport was really moldy. The Denver airport seemed a little better. The plane rides were really miserable. I was a mess when I arrived in Chicago, and then I started hyperreacting to everything. (I don't think the hyperreacting was from the airplane trip though -- more from getting clear for the first time ever and prompting intensification response.)
There are a variety of reasons I haven't flown since. I fear not having a good place to stay, like traveling around in my RV, and don't have as much money to waste as I used to. But a good part of it is that I'm afraid of what the air travel will do to me.
Perhaps this is going too far. Maybe if I went to (say) the Caribbean, the positive effects on my health would easily outweigh the negative effects of the travel. But I'm not sure.
My husband has hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles in his account, so maybe it's foolish of me not to go to a cheap Caribbean island just to try it out.
I wonder what it is that makes air travel so hard on me. Here are a couple of articles by Erik Johnson and Khaly Castle on this topic.
www.ecohustler.co.uk/2011/10/17/f....toxic-syndrome/
cfsuntied.com/blog2/2011/09/21/the-bleed/
Read more: locationseffect.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=locations&thread=237&page=1#ixzz1dtKPZKyn