Another time, a woman presented with headaches, fatigue, hives, rash, and countless chemical sensitivities. After a lifetime of fine health, she broke out with the most annoying physical symptoms from using soaps, shampoos, and cleansers.
After a blood workup revealed the presence of hexane, a petroleum derivative known to cause nerve damage, Bolte asked her about her living conditions. What, he asked, makes your home different from other people’s? She boasted that she had a fine new home. After living in a one-bedroom apartment for years, she bought and renovated the apartment next door after the birth of her first child. Now she had a roomy three-bedroom apartment, the kind of place New Yorkers would kill for.
What happened to the extra kitchen? Bolte asked her.
Now it’s my master bedroom, she replied.
You have a gas stove, right? Where did the old stove in the old kitchen sit, exactly? Can you tell me? Do you remember?
The patient’s eyes widened. My bed is right up against the spot, she said.
A few days later, at Bolte’s insistence, the woman had the gas company inspect her apartment. They located and corrected a leak in the woman’s bedroom, not far from her headboard. The patient bought and installed a small sauna unit, which she used to sweat out the toxin. Her symptoms resolved in six months.
Ethel Moore’s was the grandmother of all these cases. When the chemical analysis came back from the lab, Bolte was stunned. He picked up the phone. He told Moore that her blood test had uncovered high levels of two toxic chemicals—2-methylpentane and 3-methylpentane—both derived from petroleum products.
Could there be something in her environment that was exposing her to abnormally high levels of petroleum products? Moore said she didn’t know how that was possible. She’d already had the local board of health to her home to test her tap water and check for natural gas leaks.
He pressed on. Okay, so we’re looking for something outside the house. Have other neighbors been ill? She knew that one man who lived behind her had kidney cancer; that was all. Did she or anyone in her family work in a gas station? Was there a gas station near her home? She said no; she lived in a very nice trailer park in upstate New York, not far from I-87, the New York State Thruway. There was nothing on the site but homes just like hers, all arranged in a subdivision with Hawaiian-sounding names.
In all his years of working on houses, the doctor had never visited a trailer park. He asked Moore to describe what they looked like. How were the homes constructed? In the industry, he learned later, the correct term is “manufactured home.” The structure is built off-site and designed to fit on a trailer bed towed by a big-rig truck. Once at the site, the home is craned off the flatbed and placed onto concrete piers or cinder blocks, or permanently mounted to a custom-built foundation.
Which does your home have? Bolte asked. A foundation? Or does it sit right above the ground?
Above the ground, came Moore’s answer.
Bolte’s rambling interrogatory style threw Palmer off. “I think he’s a genius,” says Palmer, “but kind of like an idiot savant”
Do you know what was on the site previously?
She didn’t. But she promised to look into it and get back to him. He hung up reluctantly, half wondering if he should drive up north to help her, have a look around, and maybe photograph the site for his files. If she had lived there a long time in the presence of contaminated soil, her senses may have become inured to a faint petroleum smell that he would notice immediately.
When she was younger, perhaps, her immune system had been able to fend off the daily onslaught of toxins. But as she got older, they had gained the upper hand. If she spent time outdoors working, living, or gardening, she would have inhaled toxic fumes and consumed particles as part of her daily routine—and at night as she slept.
A few weeks later, Moore called with news. At her urging, the local board of health had pulled the real estate records and discovered she and some of her neighbors were living on the site of a former industrial train depot used by Standard Oil in the late 19th century. An independent lab tested the soil for petrochemicals.
Shortly after, the owners of the property voluntarily offered to excavate, remove, and replace the soil under the homes of Moore and some of her neighbors. Moore’s lesions had begun to disappear. By January 2000, the levels of toxins in her body had dropped to almost nothing, and she was living a normal life once again.
The doctor wishes he knew more about her, but she dropped out of sight sometime after their last meeting in August 2003. Beyond that, the case file is silent on the Adventure of the Petroleum-Poisoned Senior. He thinks he may have a Christmas card from her somewhere in his files. “That’s the problem with my practice,” he says. “They get well and I never hear from them again.”
