Confronting Climate Change by showing you Loveyourmother

There are many obstancles we afce in dealing with teh very real dangers of climate chaneg and global warmig.

But eprhaps teh mosts erious is denial.

For soem peopel that may be denial that humans are resposnible for teh chmnage in CO2 levels in teh environment and hence the impact on climate. But for otehrs it is more abouta  sens eof defeat in reliance on teh pwoers that be in government and industry to tKEW ACTION.

2016 update

First of all I want to thank you for visiting my blog. As you can see I wrote some posts back in 2009 and have not been back since.
I have been thinking about this whole experience more since the Zita virus has been in the news, which will likely be with us for a long time and is clearly going to spread more due to climate change and its effect on the mosquito range.
When I checked in today I was shocked to see how much traffic I have been getting here so I decided I should update things.
A lot has happened in my life and health since 2009.
I was diagnosed with CFIDS (Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome) after my first bout of pneumonia in 2008 and had a second bout in 2011.
I still don't know what caused my pneumonia, but at this point it is more the after-effects I am dealing with. It turns out that about 80% of the local population here on Vancouver Island test positive for Cryptococus Gatti exposure as the fungus has spread widely, both here on the island and on the US and Canadian west coasts.

The Big Picture

If catching a fungal disease never seen in BC until ten years ago from a simple walk in the forest can potentially have such a devastating effect on my health for a year, and is known to have caused at least two dozen deaths on Vancouver Island what are the implications for the billions of people caught in the changes brought about by Global Warming?

Healed on Cortes Island

I am on vacation on Cortes Island, a place that is only reached by taking two ferries from Vancouver Island and is quite magical. I came here with Lucy and our two girls girls for a vacation and then stayed on to take a writing workshop with Linda Solomon, the editor of the Vancouver Observer a great on-line news site.
http://www.thevancouverobserver.com
After only a few days on Cortes I was hiking trails and swimming along the beach feeling like my old self again. I finally feel fully recovered with no more bouts of exhaustion in response to a long walk or late night. It feels great.
My blood tests came back negative from the B.C. CDC, but my Urologist told me the tests for Cryptococus Gatti quite often give false negatives. So I will never know if I am truly a victim of global warming or whether my pneumonia last fall had another origin, but it is great to feel better after being ill for almost a year.
I will go for a Stress Test on a treadmill when I get back to Victoria to check my current heart function etc and then be enrolled in a twelve week rehab program to get my strength back and start to lose some of the weight I have put on being so sedentary while I was ill.
I recommend Cortes Island and the Hollyhock Retreat Center here in particular, it has been an amazingly curative two weeks here and I am staying on another five or six days which I am really looking forward to.

Some recent history

I thought I would give a bit more background on my current illness. I am using this blog as a chance to experiment with some writing on the topic of global warming related illnesses so will also be looking at other possible health links yo global warming as I go along.

I was taken ill quite suddenly back in mid September of last year. My first symptoms were a cough, chest pain and pain in my prostate. Then I spent a weekend in bed not wanting to do anything except rest and sleep, with severe nausea and no appetite at all. In a few days I had lost six or seven lbs. I went to an urgent care clinic that Monday and was checked out quite thoroughly. Since they couldn't find anything specific wrong with me they told me to see my family doctor later in the week and sent me on my way. By the Wednesday when I saw my own physician I was quite ill, I felt clammy to the touch and was finding it hard to walk or drive. She checked my chest and found signs of pneumonia and sent me off for a chest X-ray.

The folks at the X-ray clinic told me I had indeed got pneumonia and I went straight to a pharmacy to fill my antibiotic prescription and pick up some face masks to protect others from catching my bug. Since then I have made slow progress over almost 9 months, but still get exhausted easily and am even more forgetful and disorganized than ever. Just walking up the steep steps from the beach can knock me out for a while and I fall asleep at the drop of a hat in the middle of the day. But this is already a big improvement over the early days when I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day and had trouble walking around the block.

I have managed to stay fairly cheerful through all this, but it is wearing on all of us, especially my wife Lucy who has been effectively a single Mom for much of this time. The girls (5 and 7) get excited if I come to pick them up from school these days or join them for breakfast or a trip to the park, for so long I couldn't even do these simple things as a Dad. Part of the reason I am excited to see if I have Crytococcal Disease is that it gives me more hope of a rapid recovery with treatment rather than the slow grind I have been experiencing so far and it gives me a better explanation of what has been wrong with me rather than just an atypical ewaponse to pneumonia.

I talked to a friend my age in Toronto who took two years to recover from pneumonia recently and recommended lots of sunshine which he felt helped. My friend John in the UK went through 5 years with Epstein Barr which is a terrifying thought. Luckily that is one of the possibilities my docs have ruled out. I remember John as a very fit guy who worked on his small farm in Norfolk and was always up with the sun, if even he could get so tired for all those years I guess I shouldn't complain!

Waiting for the test

I was up early feeling excited to see what would happen next in my saga. I called the office of the specialist I have been seeing at our local hospital. He happens to be the head of training at the medical school and runs a clinic for hard to diagnose problems. I explained my situation to his secretary and dropped off some material I had printed out on the local Cryptococcal outbreak, including the Washington post story that is on the first entry here. I am waiting to hear back from her. There is always a chance I have already been tested as I have been poked numerous times over the last eight months, but we will soon know.

The location of our long weekend at the beach last August is the smoking gun to me given the number of people who have come home from a trip there with the bug.

A Canary in the Global Warming Mine?

Summer is just beginning here in the west coast of Canada and it is delightful. I moved here to Vancouver Island from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in June '08 with my wife and two daughters. We live in Victoria about a mile from the beach and it is a lovely place to be in many ways. There are the views of snow capped mountains across the water in Washington State and a moderate climate with much warmer winters and cooler summers than we are used to.

The bad news is I have been sick as a dog since last September when I had a nasty bout of pneumonia. So I have not been enjoying my new home as much as I would wish or feeling able to actively explore the many possibilities that living here offers.

This blog is a bit of a detective story as I try to unravel what is wrong with me and how to get better. I have been getting excellent medical care since I got sick (which is free as I'm living in Canada now) but I still can't seem to get over the after effects of my pneumonia. I feel like I have no energy at all and even a short uphill walk or other moderate exercise knocks me out for a day or so. I also feel pretty foggy a lot of the time so serious mental activity is a challenge at best, though this is slowly improving, as for example my maths skills are returning.

I just got an email from my father-in-law this evening suggesting I look into a fungal disease that he had read about while visiting us recently. It turns out this disease comes from a fungus that is common at Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park near Parksville BC, where we had stayed just a few weeks before I got sick. The park has an impressive forest with tall trees and lots of damp areas, just right for fungus spores to gather in the air as you walked by and pop into your lungs.

Quite a few folks have apparently become ill after similar vacations at the beach there. At one point a few years ago they even posted warnings on the Park web site resulting in almost 1000 cancellations for camp site bookings. Not surprisingly they no longer post the warning. Fortunately most people who are exposed to this bug don't seem to get sick from it, but those who do can get quite ill.

I have written a note to my doctor asking to be tested for Cryptococcus-gattii which is the name of this illness. It is a nasty disease and has killed 19 people on the Island in the last ten years and sickened almost 250. The good news is it is treatable and for folks like me who are not immunosuppressed it is less likely to be lethal.

The strangest part of all this is that this is usually a tropical disease found in Australia and has only been around in BC since 1999 and mainly only on Vancouver Island, though it is apparently spreading around the Island and onto the mainland now with a projected course down the coast towards California.

The global warming connection is that the fungus was probably dormant here for a long time, but only recently became active due to the recent spate of warm summers. It is also more dangerous than its sister bugs in Australia, Oregon and Washington or its cousins elsewhere in the world. Aren't I the lucky one to get it, if indeed I have.

Below is the web address for an article from the Washington Post if you want to learn more about this fascinating illness and its global warming connections.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/08/MNGEIP501T1.DTL&type=printable