Anxiety and Depression

This is much more difficult to do than I thought it would be. Reading my spray foam journals and looking at my pictures have caused me to psychologically and emotionally revisit the entire trauma of the day they sprayed the foam, and the weeks and months following, and feel a lot of anxiety, panic attacks, and deep depression again. Not that I was completely over any of that, but I had sort of learned to deal with my situation so that it wasn't affecting me as deeply as it had been. It's not easy when your entire future, including financial security, has been wiped out and you are left with a void. That is, a void that includes a new sensitivity to common environmental chemicals that makes living in a cheap apartment (which is all I can afford), or even visiting friends, difficult. How do you tell someone that their home is giving you a headache? Not many people understand and I've heard "well, do you think it's all in your mind?" too many times. Fortunately, not everyone thinks it's all in my mind, but the folks who are sympathetic and have an understanding of what has happened to me are few (and sadly include only a couple of my friends). But like Bernie said, "you know what's in your mind and this is real." Thank goodness for Bernie, who has spent a lot of time listening to me on the phone and trying to help me find a glimmer of hope. Bernie even when out of his way to visit with me and have a look at our attic when he was in my area testing another home with a bad spray foam job. Thank you for your kindness, Bernie.

The mental damage is easy to figure out: your entire home smells like a chemical factory, then later like a pile of dead fish, and you've come to the realization that you can't live in your home unless you want to use an SCBA and wear an entire protective suit 24 hours per day. Then later you begin to panic because you find out you've been exposed to a big dose of hazardous chemicals, some which might cause cancer but even if you don't get cancer you could have any number of other serious effects in your central nervous system, endocrine system, cardiovascular system... But you don't know exactly what you've been exposed to because some of the ingredients are "trade secrets". It's very traumatic.

But, after I was exposed to the spray foam chemicals in the house, it took several months for me to realize what was continuing to happen to me physically. At first, after I moved out of the house and into a hotel, I didn't understand why I was still having problems with symptoms... until I talked to another spray foam victim that I'd been in phone contact with. The first question he asked me was about my clothing, which I said I had in the hotel room with me (in my Tumi luggage, along with all my other personal items I'd brought with me from the house), and told me he, 2 years later, still can't be around anything that was in his home when it was sprayed without getting headaches and other symptoms. My clothes had smelled like spray foam chemicals when I took them out of the closet and actually continued for months to retain spray foam odors, which changed over time similar to the odors in the house, including that fishy type odor, even after many washings.

So I put all my favorite clothes and shoes into storage, ended up selling my Tumi luggage, and bought some cheap shit. Ha! Jokes on me. I then learned, from yet another spray foam victim that I'd already talked with a couple of times, whom I called the day I walked into the mattress store and experienced burning eyes and sinuses, breathlessness and dizziness, that he suspected it might have to do with the fire retardants or formaldehyde...or any number of other nasty chemicals... in the mattresses. He and his wife had had great difficulty finding a mattress that didn't cause headaches and other symptoms after their exposure to spray foam and subsequent chemical sensitivities. So then it began to dawn on me that fire retardants and formaldehyde are in practically everything. Including my new cheap clothing and my car...

I wasn't ignorant to the fact that our entire environment is saturated with toxic chemicals, and that we are surrounded by polyurethane foam products, but they had never affected me like they do now. Now, I wonder if I will be able to find a place to live in which I don't feel sick...other than on a beach on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean. If I could afford that, I'd already be there trying to get over this traumatic spray foam nightmare.

Give me some time. I promise I will tell the whole story. But here are some tidbits...

Our attic was sprayed on July 13, 2012. I began having disturbing symptoms that same day, which gradually worsened. I finally had to move out 12 days later.


Above is a photo I took the day they sprayed. They actually let me go up into the attic, never told me it was dangerous or that I shouldn't. They had just begun spraying, as you can see, and suddenly the spray noise stopped and I heard a lot of stomping up and down the stairs, so I went to investigate. I later learned that, from the beginning, they were having trouble with their spray equipment and had sprayed a lot of off ratio foam. Later, when I asked the guy why he kept spraying he said, "well, I thought the job had to be finished that day." What a fucking idiot. Thank you Ross & Witmer and Brandon Tucker.

Here are Shane Hunter (on the ladder), Hunter Crosswell and Tucker Travis in the upstairs hallway, getting ready to spray our attic. Notice the carpet still on the floor and nothing is protected. I questioned Shane Hunter about that and he said it would be alright so I figured it would; especially since my friend said they had taken great care of her lovely home. But at the end of the day there were foam particles, foam mist droplets, and a lot of dirt on the carpet, on an old wooden trunk that was left in the hall, on the woodwork, walls, stairs, and even in the downstairs hallway.

I'd gotten the name and number of Shane Hunter from a friend of mine who'd had her attic spaces insulated with spray foam and was quite please with the entire job from beginning to end. I was in her home about a week after it was sprayed and there was hardly any odor when I smelled the foam in her attic. Although I now can't spend any time in her home, because the odor was so minimal and after a very scant bit of reading about how great spray foam insulation is, I decided to use foam insulation, and that's why I called Shane Hunter to do the job. I had no reason not to trust my friend's recommendations. She has a gorgeous home and spends a lot of money on it.

I have no idea where Shane Hunter is now, but the week of panic following the spray, we learned that he'd been fired (for some sort of unethical behavior...) from Energy One America, who Shane was with when my friend's attics were sprayed, and then hired by Ross & Witmer almost immediately. When I talked to Jeff Elog, the manager of Ross & Witmer, he never indicated that he had no idea who my friend was even after I told him how pleased she was with the job they did at her house, and neither he nor Shane Hunter ever told me that it was a different company who sprayed my friend's home. I was led to believe that everything would be the same, including the foam which I later found out was another lie - NCFI was sprayed in her attic and Demilec in mine.

I also later learned that none of these Ross & Witmer boys had ever sprayed foam as a retrofit into an attic before, and that they had just been "certified" right before they did so for the first time in our house. In fact, Brandon Tucker told me, when I finally questioned him, after the damage was done, that all they'd ever done was use a "small rig" for sealing holes, whatever that means. The only guy at our house that day with experience spraying foam was someone named Armando who, I later was told, speaks hardly any English and might not have even been "certified". I can't verify that, though.