‘WHY VALLEYS MOVE SAVED MY LIFE’
AWOMAN told “move or die” after she became allergic to food, perfume and diesel, relocated to Wales to save her life.
Wearing a face mask and social distancing has become a feature of coranvirus restrictions during the pandemic for millions of people.
However, for Loulou Palmer, wearing a mask both indoors and outdoors became a part of life for nearly six years, following a routine hospital test which triggered a devastating allergic reaction.
And, at the time, 48-year-old, Loulou, now from Cwmtillery, in Blaenau Gwent, knew it was a situation she had to face alone.
Things that most people take for granted, like aftershave or aeroplane trails overhead, risked triggering a potentially fatal anaphylactic shock.
Now, she has shared her enormous task of retraining her brain and body to help others going through the same thing as her.
Originally living in Bristol, therapist Loulou had been running a number of practices when she underwent a CAT scan for suspected appendicitis.
While she had suffered with allergies since the age of two, the reaction her body had as the dye hit her veins was nothing she could ever have expected.
Loulou said: “I hadn’t had a reaction for 13 years by that point.
“I came out of the scan in anaphylactic shock and was like that for 48 hours, it was just raging. It was like Spider Man being bitten by the spider, I came out completely different from when I went in.
“I just came home and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t feeling any better. My body was just like a puffer fish.
“I’d go from normal me to three dress sizes bigger, looking like I’d been on steroids my whole life. My throat would close over, my tongue wouldn’t fit in my head. My eyes were bulging out my skull. I had sausage fingers, I couldn’t get my shoes on. It was mental.
“I was super fit and then my lung capacity disappeared. I couldn’t get more than 15 feet to the bottom of the drive and back again.”
As Loulou’s health deteriorated, more and more substances began to trigger an allergic reaction.
While it was little understood at the time, she believes it was caused by a reaction to a phenolic compound found in diesel but also in things like perfumes,
cleaning products, glue and food – including coffee and chocolate.
This created a compromised immune system which resulted in both anaphylactic shock and asthma.
In 2017, Imperial College London published a report showing how diesel fumes can trigger respiratory reflexes which could potentially worsen underlying conditions, such as asthma.
Speaking at the time, Professor Maria Belvisi explained: “Our work shows that particles from diesel exhaust can activate these ion channels, stimulating the nerves in the lungs. This may be responsible for the respiratory symptoms we see following exposure to urban air pollution.”
Loulou said: “For some reason my system picked up on whatever that was in contrast dye and just went ‘f*** off you’re not having that’. It changed my life.
“One morning after a particularly tricky night I was just trying to sit out in the garden and collect myself. I was just wheezing and wheezing and I couldn’t understand and then I looked up and there was 20, 30 chem trails from airplanes above Bristol.
“I had not long found about the diesel – I had been in a diesel ambulance and nearly died. We got halfway to Southmead and they had to pull over because they were losing me. They had the doors open, the engine running on the main road to the hospital.”
As someone who has lived with the threat of an allergic reaction over her head for more than half a decade, Loulou has had to develop a dark sense of humour.
She jokes as she explains that even her neighbour’s washing would set her allergies off, and that she and her partner once had to reassure travellers on a flight that she was OK since she was “not the right shade of purple” to merit an emergency.
But when things reached their worst Loulou was left with no other choice but to close her business and pack up her life in Bristol after being told by her immunologists to “move or die” – decisions with large mental health consequences in their own right.
She said: “I could go through three EpiPens a day on a bad day, it gave me a heart arrhythmia. The last time I saw the asthma nurse, and she handed me the pump... she literally handed me the pump and said ‘with the rate that you’re using it this could give you a heart attack’.”
Describing the moment she discovered her new life in Blaenau Gwent, Loulou added: “I noticed the air the moment we drove around this valley looking at other houses.
“This was literally the last house of the day. In a house on the opposite side of the valley I burst into tears and said ‘I physically can’t do this anymore’.
“Every time we did a round of seeing houses, obviously, in the houses there would be cleaning products and all those things.
“And then we drove up here and I literally looked at the face of my dream home.”
Since moving to Wales, things have been far from easy for Loulou and her partner. At one point, after discovering they needed a new kitchen, she spent an entire three weeks literally living in her bedroom to avoid any reactions from the materials and the dust.
On another occasion, answering the door to a plumber left her gasping for breath, all because he had showered earlier that morning.
More than anything, however, being away from the pollution of busy city life gave Loulou the change to start afresh – and start a mental and physical journey to the position she is in now.
Thanks to the help of a life-saving nutritionist, as well as focusing on her mental health and wellbeing, she is now one and a half years free from medication.
Loulou said: “It was a gradual process. Moving here was a key point to it, it was definitely a mind, body, soul approach. So I got out of the environment that was making it so hard.
“Then I started working with an amazing nutritionist... and she literally rebuilt me from the inside out.
“I was a therapist and had studied the brain and all the systems of the body. I understood that step one was to get clean air and give my lungs space to actually recuperate and for all the heavy metals to come out my system, and then there would have to be dealing with the brain and just rewiring it.
“From from a psychological perspective, my mental health was zero. By the time I got here, I had shut my business.
“I had trained for 15 years, I’d run that business for 13 years so it was a massive part of my identity.
“All of a sudden I was nothing. “I had to regain my mental balance and so meditation is a fantastic tool.
“I didn’t know what health was at that point. I didn’t even imagine being alive in the next 10 minutes, sometimes. So it was a huge leap of faith to make believe. Joy was a real hard commodity so I had to cultivate it, make believe, pull upon memories of joyful times.”
For Loulou meditation has been a key part of her recovery process. Now, if she begins to feel the effects of an allergic reaction she will go into a meditative state to settle her body.
After a week-long retreat with lecturer Dr Joe Dispenza she handed in her mask as a symbol of her recovery, and has been without it for two years thanks to what Loulou describes as her “new body”.