SWEEP WEEPs

I first noticed a connection between "sick" headaches, pain and numbness in my right shoulder and arm, and exposure to flourescent lighting in 1977 while attending Niagara College in Welland, Ontario. I was in the Library Technician Program, and Libraries were on the verge of converting their card catalogues and microfische data bases to computers. I could not get comfortable with the idea, and halfway through my second year I dropped out, and moved west, first to Granisle BC, amining town in the interior. There I was the night auditor (midnight to 8am) for 18 months in the local hotel, and then spent another 18 months as a filter operator working constantly changeing shifts and coming home covered in copper dust everyday. We only wore masks if there was visible dust in the air. My shoulder pain was worse, and headaches were pretty regular occurrences. From 1981 to 1984 we lived in a tipi in the woods, three miles outside the tiny coastal town of Stewart, BC with kerosene light and wood heat. I was very healthy, and headaches were rare. In late 1985, we moved to Meziadin Lake BC, a remote wilderness area, where we built a home: log, with a big enamelled metal roof that when connected by a piece of blasting wire to an old car stereo, gave us radio reception.Occasionally, I would "hear" radio reception in my teeth, especially the first year. When the Chernoble nuclear accident happened in 1986, we were directly accross the straight of Kamchatka. We knew there was a microwave relay tower 3km from us, also on the lake, which provided the telephone signal for the nearby town of Stewart, and the payphones at Meziadin Juction, less than a mile from the tower, but it is only now that I understand the connection to the frequent and sometimes severe headaches and joint pain that re-emerged around the end of 1987. These headaches included sinus pain and nausea, and also coincided with the building of a 137 KV transmission line 200 feet from my back door, and new neighbors who clear cut their acre lot and ran a very sick diesel generator 24/7 for two years, until we were finally successful in getting them to clean it up in 1989. I was pregnant with my third child during that time, and had constant morning sickness that disappeared when I went to Stewart, or anywhere away from our home for more than a day. Since they had removed the bush from their lot, the blue smoke from their generator would leave their yard and get hung up in our trees and bush. Ivey was born 2 weeks premature (February 18 1988), and is also electrically sensitive (her first major reaction in grade one: terrible debilitating flu like symptoms, brought on by an aquarium in the one room school at Meziadin Lake.Although I didn't know about dirty electricity or magnetic fields consciously, something made me insist that Ivey's desk be moved to the other side oft the room, by a window, open whenever possible. This helped a lot.). Things were better after the cleanup of the generator, but we had a generator of our own that we ran a few houirs a day, especially in winter, with a large flourescent in the kithen where I worked only a couple of feet from it, being a full time wife and mother. Headache medication was still a staple in our home, as was Tiger Balm for my joint pain. In 1992 we began 5 years of a mainainance contract as the Facility Operators of Meziadin Lake Provincial Park, just a stone's throw from the Microwave tower. Around this time I also began to spend a lot of time lobbying the BC government on the pay phone at Meziadin Junction. My aim was to access power from the line they had built past us, and it finally happened in 1999. In the intervening years, I probobly spent an average of three hours a day with a reciever jammed into my ear talking or waiting to talk with government officials , community organizations and lawyers. We worked very hard in the Park, but overall were pretty healthy, aside from pretty regular headaches, and flare ups of my joint pain. In 1996 we opened Club Mez Corner Store, at Meziadin Junction, where the counter I sat at was no more than three feet from the switch box. There was a bank of flourescent lights down the length of the building, and power came from a big generator at the back of the property. This junction was located 1km from the Microwave station, half a km from the park. As the proprietor, I spent on average 10 hours a day at Club Mez. . When not behind the counter, I was composing copius correspondence on our computer, and then faxing it off, usually standing right by the fax so I could regulate the feed. My children came to the store after school and on weekends, so I also began to cook on a Convection/Microwave. By the end of 1999, my fatigue was extreme: within moments of sitting down at home each night, I would be in a deep sleep, sitting up, sometimes I would even find myself dozing behind the counter at work. But look at my lifestyle, right? I did notice an improvement in my shoulder pain after moving a wooden gun case that had been under our bed. I didn't know how or why, but I knew it was a problem. In June 2000, we closed Cub Mez and I took a month off. This did a lot for me and I felt full of life in July when I went to work for my friend who owned the Junction, at the Meziadin cafe. The work there was also hard in the summer, slow in the winter, but only eight or nine hours a day, and two days off a week. I definitely improved over the next two years. Our house was now hooked up to the grid, and there were no more diesel generators in the neighborhood. It was still normal for me to have at least one severe headache a week, lasting one or two days, but I would medicate and carry on. In 2002, the end of my marriage led to my return to the Niagara Penninsula, where I moved into an apartment building in the lee of huge transmission towers. It was a cozy place, heated by radiant electricity in the walls and floor and cieling. We were on the second floor, and I slept on a metal futon frame. I quickly went to work at Convergys, a call center where the client was AT&T Wireless. There were lots of positions open, but they wanted people to work the late shift: 5pm to 2:30am. Already a strike against the immune system, but of course there was much more. The training classrooms, where we spent 9 weeks,each had 26 computers ina 12 x 24 space, with another classroom on the other side of the walls. In addition there were lots of flourescent lights, overhead projectors and outllets galore. Within the first two weeks, everyone of my classmates, including me, came down with many of the symptoms we now know are related to exposure to dirty electricity and magnetuc fields: headaches, flu-like symtoms, dry cough, and fatigue to name a few. This was regarded as normal, but at the same time, you could not miss any training, or you would have to go back to the beginning with another class. My particular"Wave" of classes, were the first to be trained for the specific job of "migrating" existing AT&T digital tecnology customers to the new 2.5g system, a stepping stone to UMTS. When I left for the final time in Sept 2004, the process was now "migrating" people to the true 3g, or UMTS. For many years I'd had a little cough, (which I now control by staying away from dairy products,) but in the call center it changed. There was a constant tickle, and I used a can of Altoids mints every work week. Once we were "on the floor" we were in a grocery store sized building, carpeted over concrete, banks of floourescent lights, far too close together. The work stations were long rows back to back, no more than three feet wide, and not quite as deep. Monitor, keyboard and telephone on the desktop, PC tower on the floor at the rep's knee, multiplied by 400 or so.By the end of 2002, I was once again very fatigued, with frequent, debilitating headaches. Like everyone else, I carried a little can of medications for work: painkillers, antihistimines, digestive aids. I worked with many people who developed skin allergies, and there was an ongoing skirmish involving the percieved "flea bites" that people experienced, and the lack of fleas discovered by the pest control people. I experienced this myself: sudden intense itching and when you scratch, a blister breaks off and bleeds, just as if you've been bitten by an insect of some sort. Several reps working near to me had other dermatalogical effects as well, on their hands and faces, as well as eye strain, itching, pulling sensation and watering. One sufferred from chronic fatigue, another fibromyalgia, and many found themselves using asthma puffers, which they had not needed since high school, or dealing with a constant cough, even when no illness was present. Early in 2003, I began to notice a heaviness and irritated feeling in my right breast. By the end of Feb there were actual physical changes: shrinking and hardening of the breast tissue, and an inversion of the nipple. It felt hot inside without actually being hot in a way that could be measured. I looked in a recent medical book at a Chapters store, and determined that I probobly had Inflammatory Breast Cancer. The only Doctor taking patients in Welland at that time (Dr Tucker) classically misdiagnosed it as an infection, even though I shared what I had learned and feared with him (which prompted him to ask where I had gone to Medical Scool). I took the course of antibiotics, starting on two days off, and thought they were helping at first. By the end I was worse, and asked if I could see the Doctor to discuss a differrent treatment. He had scheduled me for a mammogram, but not till June.. Ultrasound and xrays of my abdomen, but not of my breasts, were done fairly soon and when I went back to see him, he prescribed medication for a hiatus hernia, and another round of the same antibiotic. The first week of May, my right arm and hand swelled up over night. The skin was tight and hard, and it felt very heavy. I called to request an ultrasound of my breasts, before the mammogram in June. I had it done within the week, but when I called for a follow up appointment, I was told the Doctor wanted to wait for the results of the Mammogram before seeing me again. Grudgeingly, I waited. Upon seeing me walk in to his office, this Doctor said to me "Good news, no cancer" . He did not show me the results of either test, but made a "just to be sure " appoinment with a surgeon, but not till August!

It was now the end of June, and unwilling to wait, my sister got me in to see her Doctor (who was my Family Doctor before moving out West) Dr Fakim immediatly sent me to a surgeon, but not before showing me the report from the Breast Ultrasound, which was very clear about the likelihood of cancer, and immediate follow up with a surgeon. A set of biopsies confirmed the diagnoses I had made at Chapters: Infiltrating Carcinoma, relatively rare (but getting more common) and mostly deadly. I had 10 days off in July, and as I told the Oncologist, Dr Findlay, I really felt as if it had gotten a little better, just before I was due to start Chemotherapy. My first two weeks of chemo were on my next vacation days in August. After that I dragged myself to work, often feeling out of my body and quite nauseous, until I began the next two week stint in September. By mid September I determined I could no longer work while undergoing chemotherapy. We had moved over the summer, and while it was better than the last place, it was also quite polluted, electrically. (Gauss meter readings in the yard were 7mg this summer) During the chemo, I became sensitive to everything, tastes, smells, sounds. The old pain in my right shoulder and headaches were back,and new pain in my left shoulder and arm, which sometimes pulsed in the titanium port a cath in my left chest, along with terrible fatigue. My last session was in mid January 2004. By May I was feeling pretty good, and we moved again, to a lovely place, but, I was to discover, also polluted. Also in May, My sister cut out an article in our local paper The Tribune, on the " Beyond Silent Spring" Conferrence that had just taken place at Brock University, nearby, put on by the Breast Cancer Research and Education Fund, of St Catherines. That article led me to become part of the BCREF, and introduced me to Dirty Electricity, and Dave Stetzer. By July, I felt better than I had in years, and, to Dr Findlays surprise, I went back to work at Convergys. This was to be my last appointment with him, as his reaction to how well I was doing , was that I should consider having a bilateral mastectomy and a lot of radiation " just on the pie-in-the-sky-chance that we might get all the cancer. " This from the same Doctor who had told me each appointment that "We're not going to cure this cancer, more like try to manage symptoms, since it is a systemic disease." I requested to change to Dr Giesbrecht, but did not see her until late September. By the end of my third week back, I was becoming increasingly tired, my upper respiratory tickle/cough was back, and overnight on August 02,2004, my left hand and arm swelled for the first time, and the swelling was back in the right as well. The fourth week, I began to percieve the "feeling" in both breasts, but this time more pronounced in the left breast. Before I was diagnosed, I had worn my headset on the right side, with the cord clipped to my clothes across the right breast. Upon my return I found that my right ear was bothered by the head set, so I switched to the left: coincidence? Not! I was on dayshift, with static days off, due to my "disability", but still I became debilitatingly tired and dyslexic by the end of each week. At first I could recover sufficiently on my days off, but soon I became too polluted.On Sept 01, 2004, I met Dave Stetzer at the Etobicoke School of Art, where he was overseeing the installation of Graham Stetzer Filters. I aquired some filters, thanks to Dave, my Sister and my best freind. My apartment was so "dirty" that the microsurge meter could not read until some filters were plugged in. I noticed an immediate positive effect, and took ten filters to work, thinking I might be able to protect myself and still go to work. The first week or so it did help, but the second week of September, I was going home early, taking days off, and finally, on

eptember 15, I knew I could not stay any longer. My symptoms were extreme, heat and noise in my head, sharp pain in the left shoulder radiating to the port in my chest, upper respiratory distress, confusion, headache, swelling in my arms and fatigue. Upon getting home, I plugged in the rest of the filters, made some tea, and within an hour most of the symptoms were either gone or greatly reduced. Once again I was forced to stop working, and I began to make contact with the Occupational Health Clinic, The Worker's Health and Safety Center, and the Ministry of Labour, on the advice of my MP's Office (Peter Kormos) The Occupational Health Clinic was very willing to conduct a study in the workplace, but Convergys Middle Managers would not even speak to John Oudyke of the OHC, or to Dave Stetzer, who had offerred to come and speak to Convergys on the subject. I provided those Managers ( Including The Joint Health and Safety Commitee) with a disc of peer reviewed research, as well as quite a lot of hard copy. I had a meeting with the then senior manager of operations, Ross Duff, in early Sept 2004, who acknowledged my concerns, but made it clear that the problem was mine, not theirs, and they couldn't endanger their "Client's Proprietary Information.", by allowing any kind of study, and they were also not prepared to install filters in the Welland Convergys site, just for me. They couldn't allow Dave Stetzer to speak to them because of their "very strict non-solicitation policy". This was a matter of employee health, and Dave would simply have done a presentation on Dirty Electricity, but Joanne MacLeod, the management representative for the Joint Health & safety Commitee, told me in a private meeting in the HR of Convergys in late August 2004, that their "policy" would not allow this: this same policy, however, allowed, during my brief tenure there, tables set up in the employees cafeteria, by Costco (giving out $50 rebates on memberships (that cost $50) Nokia (offerring cheap cell phones for Convergys Employees) Niagara College (Recruiting Students!) Needless to say, the policy that was actually being adhered to was the "Don't Rock the Boat" policy. But the boat is out in high seas already. And Employers in the Call Center Industry in particular, need to start addressing the problem, because it HAS been brought to your attention, by many more people than myself. In the case of Convergys, I believe that the Managers there (Particularily that one attatched to the JHSC) have acted in a criminal manner, similar to that of Hydro One's dealings with Martin Weatherall, and Bell Canada's with Lorna Wilson. Still they cry "no proof" but it's not true. Because of Dave Stetzer and Martin Graham, scientists have a tool whereby they can remove the dirty electricity, and measure the biological effects. Emminent Environmental Researcher, Dr Magda Havas is immersed in the research, and the results are doing what a report by the Ministry of Labour's Radiation Specialist Peter Fuhry ( carried out at Convergy the first week of November 2004, at my behest) called for; namely that the non thermal biological effects be demonstrated with enough force to be included in the Exposure Standards The past year has been very full, after detoxing at home in my somewhat safe apartment (where I had 28 filters and Chokes on all the radiators) and doing biofeedback therapy, and diet therapy (including an Essiaclike tea I've been taking since chemo) I have kept my symptoms at bay, at least enough so that no more chemo has been offerred. I had a mercury filled molar removed, and would like to have the rest of my corroding mercury filled teeth removed as well. A bone scan (coupled with two xrays same day) in April, showed nothing, but caused me excruciating pain in my left shoulder, arm and hand. My shoulder had been sensitive since the insertion of the titanium port for venous access, and I'd had two other bone scans, with no reaction while it was happening, but fatigue and joint pain for a week or more after. I fully expected this would be the same, but as soon as the digital counter was pressed, terrible pain began in my shoulder and elbow. A cramp, I thought, and tried to will it away without moving, since you are supposed to be very still. The pain crept down my forearm to my hand, while always increasing in the shoulder and elbow, and a building pressure in my head. Unconciously, I began to pant and whimper, and the Technician, Boris, leaned over and softly, seriously, asked if I had "taken something". I told him it was hurting me, but he said that was impossible, there was nothing to hurt me, it was just a camera. I managed to get through the first 17 min shot, as soon as the timer dinged , the pain flooded away and became just a background ache. Boris assured me once again that nothing could hurt me, and started the next shot, I think it was 4 minutes, It was the same, but worse more quickly, right down to my fingertips, and a pressure in my head ; all whooshing away with the counter's "ding", and starting again for the final shot. Boris began counting down for me on the final two shots " Just 3 more minutes, just 2 and a half more minutes " etc. Bless him. After it was over, I was pale, shaky, disoriented, and my left arm was achy and throbbing. For a couple of weeks I felt as if I were recovering from a very bad flu, and the burning pain in my upper right rib was constant.All of May and June, my shoulder was my meter, flaring up with a throbbing pain in the presence of magnetic fields and dirty electricity. I could not place my arm behind my back, or lift it above my head: not only did it cause terrible pain, it simply wouldn't move. I got a completely wooden and foam bed, and that helped a little. I have since moved once again, as their were three huge transformers at the front of the old place, and another at the back, both no more than 30 feet from the second floor balconies. Twice in the basement, where my laundry hook up was, I experienced an attack, probobly of ground current, which caused me cripplinf, stabbing pain in my left mid back, below the I went back with a gauss meter and that intersection is around 10mg. The whole time I lived there, my left shoulder was very sensitive, causing me severe pain on movement, and getting so I couldn't move it some ways even with pain, it just wouldn't move. I went to a great occupational therapist, I did all the home exercises and ice packs, but really the only thing that helped in the end was moving to a neighborhood of small homes with no big transformers. I have regained the use of that arm without pain, 90%, and have not been doing the ice packs or other therapies.The house has no basement and the magnetic field is less than one mg, I have put Chokes on the water, gas and hydro pipes outside. The dirty electricity readings were 24-31 with peaks of 39-44 the first month I was here (July) The day before Hurricane Katrina Made landfall (Aug 28) those RF/Dirty Electricity readings went up so normal was 39-47 with peaks of 50-65, and they have only gone back to normal briefly Sept 20-22. In the presence of microwave towers and cell phone masts, I feel pain/pressure in my ears, sinus and jaw, becoming headache and nausea if I cannot get away. Previously, my left shoulder had been my "meter", but it is vastly improved, only twinging after long exposure ( an hour in the mall) The ear pain and pressure manifested Sept 4th out at Lake Mudie, near Brock University. On the shores of a connecting lake (Lake Gibson) a Remote Control Aircraft Club was audible from our little point of land.where we often picnic. My friend and I were standing on some half submerged rocks close to shore, enjoying the bliss of the day and the spot, as she moved off her rock, which was located a foot from a large metal boom, I suddenly felt a little wobbly. My rock was not as flat as the one Ruth had vacated, so I moved to hers, and instantly was assailed with vertigo. My head filled up with noise and heat and I was overwhelmed by nausea. I got to shore and gasped for Ruth to put the cushion in the shade for me. My head was filled with a combination of crashing surf and clanging factory noise, with a sort of buzzing through it all, as I moved to lay down , my left ear plugged up as if I had just made a huge shift in altitude, and my right ear had a sharp pain. On the edge of my vision it was first very bright, then a band of dark, and then my regular vision, but it felt "pulled" Within a minute of laying down I was a little better, The noise, heat and nausea quickly receeded to background unpleasantness, but the plugging/painful ear , and buzzing, as well as the bright/dark spots in my vision have been added to my list of symptoms that come and go with my envirnment. Since that day I have felt worse than previously, especially fatigued and brain fogged, and all my "meters" functioning. Even so, I feel very priviliged to be a part of bringing this Crime of the Century to the attention of those who make our policies regarding safe exposure levels.