March 15-April 15: 13th annual Jubilee Festival of the Arts (Thibodaux)
March 1, 2011
Elder abuse … old enough to know better
March 3, 2011
People are sick, and that’s about all anyone knows at this point.
The remedies? Not traditional prescription drugs. The cause? No one can know for sure. Will it extend beyond what it is now? Another unknown.
Scientists are on the scene, advocating their theories and trying to disprove their counterparts. One side claims the illnesses are linked to crude oil that gushed out of the Macondo Prospect well after the Deepwater Horizon explosion last April. The other side says, ‘Not a chance. The volatile solvents evaporated.’
Meanwhile, the sick stay sick, expending their monetary resources as they travel the Gulf Coast states looking for treatment.
They begin to pine for answers, more so than the return of their health. Will they ever find them? Nobody knows.
As they traverse from hospital-to-hospital, expert-to-expert and state-to-state, their health remains unimproved. Satisfactory treatment seems so distant and so unapproachable that it seems easier to thirst for answers, even if that’s an equally fruitless quest.
Just ask Chad, who requested his real name be withheld due to an ongoing process in securing a claim with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility and potential litigation against several doctors.
He was briefed every morning about the non-toxic nature of the chemicals he would come into contact with for 62 days. Chad said he made almost $2,600 per day working as the captain of a 35-foot boat in Bay Jimmy, a job that he says cost him his eyesight.
Today, Chad is blind in his right eye and severely impaired in his left. His grandchildren, 8 and 10 years old, escort him around the house “like a dog.” Without his wife around, he can’t even jot down a phone number.
For more than two months, the 58-year-old Louisiana resident captained a boat in the upper reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, where he and his crew would retrieve soiled boom, bag it and replace it with clean barriers. Scientists claim they did so without adequate safety precaution, such as a half-faced respirator.
While replacing the first line of defense for Louisiana’s marshes and its coastline, workers wore a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves and boots and a pair of sunglasses. “They weren’t even polarized,” Chad said.
Chad’s vulnerability was tangible, realized each day when the infested water would splash onto his flesh, onto his cheek where a half-faced respirator should have rested. Never mind the airborne contaminants, the intangible threat all coastal residents face. This was “continuous, forever” oil-on-face, Chad says.
“When we came in with the boats, we were orange,” he said. “We were orange. Literally, orange and it didn’t wash off because this stuff was going in our pores, our eyes, ears, mouth, and the boat that I had, had no windshield, of course. Hardly any of the boats out there had windshields.
“The joke of the day used to be, the other boats would say, ‘Was the water salty today or oily?’ because that’s how much splashed in your face. The design of this boat, you actually wore a rain suit to run the boat, but it still didn’t protect your face.”
The everlasting exposure to the crude coupled with Chad’s additional ailments, including diarrhea, constant pain in his side, headaches and dizziness – has one physician convinced the illness is linked to the oil spill.
“Well, now we have a doctor who wrote it up in plain English, ‘I am most certain that the toxins that are in his blood attacked his optic nerves and made him go blind, and these toxins are still in his body, affecting his kidneys, his liver, his brain…,'” Chad said before he digressed and recalled a recent bout with dizziness.
But Chad still can’t find a suitable and traditional treatment. Instead, he has turned to a detoxifying, organic diet.
“I’m on a strictly organic diet with special vitamins that he has prescribed,” Chad said. “No prescriptions. Like
His illness was facilitated through his daily encounters with the volatile compounds, one doctor would tell him. He doesn’t wholeheartedly disagree, but instead points to one incident, the day before he began to lose his eyesight — his birthday.
During the clean-up process, a venture into the marsh was off-limits — too dangerous to the habitat, a sensitive area that was treated as such throughout the summer. But there was boom that needed retrieval, so BP trained some of Chad’s crew to walk across boards laid across the marsh.
“They trained some kids, which one of them was my nephew, to walk the marsh on these pieces of plywood, grab this boom that had been up there for 100-something days with all the dead animals and stuff on it, and bring it out to the boats — drag it out with ropes to the boats, and we’d load it up into the bags,” Chad said.
“The only time I wasn’t boat captain, I rode on this little mini-barge for two days, Aug. 4 and Aug. 5, and it got splashed in my face as they were picking it up. I was on my break. The next day is when I lost vision in my right eye.
“It just stunk so bad. People were gagging as we were picking it up. The other boom, we’d leave it out five days, and we’d pick it up. They had oil on it, but that’s oil. This stuff had been out there 100 days, since the beginning with dead everything all over it. It stunk so bad, you felt like you stuck your face in a septic tank.”
Or ask Paul Doomm, a healthy 22-year-old Florida resident who was prepping for the Marines last summer when he ignored his family’s pleas and swam in the Gulf of Mexico waters off Navarre and Pensacola beaches.
The once-healthy young adult is now confined to a wheelchair, suffers from chronic headaches and dizziness when he isn’t having one of his several seizures each day, has no mobility or feeling in his extremities on the left side of his body and MRI results show lesions, or “white spots,” on his brain that “he didn’t have before,” his mother Kathy Doomm told the Tri-Parish Times.
The cause is as opaque as the foam remnants of the oil-and-dispersant chemical reaction that once washed upon the Gulf’s shoreline and the solution is shrouded in conspiracy theories and first-case-scenario ignorance.
Doomm went to 14 different Florida hospitals in search of answers and treatment, his mother said. The doctors’ output ranged from a diagnosis of status epilepticus, a potentially fatal condition in which the brain is in a constant state of seizure, and prescription of two seizure medications; to accusations of Paul fabricating the seizures; to a vague reference of a spill-related-illness cover-up, Mrs. Doomm said.
Mrs. Doomm said the family waited four days at a hospital in South Florida for insurance clearance so it could go to the hospital of its choice, “a large teaching hospital in central Florida.” After waiting three full days, Mrs. Doomm called the insurance company.
“The doctor kept promising us that ‘We were going to go, we were going to go,’ but it would probably be an insurance issue,” Kathy Doomm said. “Finally on Day 4, he kept saying, ‘I still don’t have clearance,’ and I called my insurance. I was really angry. [The insurance company] said, ‘You were cleared two days ago.’ So the doctor was lying to us. He wasn’t telling the truth. We confronted him, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You just know too much.’ He actually said that.”
“People have been coming to us, and they have everything from upper respiratory problems, dizziness, blood coming out of their ears, blood in their urine, rectal bleeding, rashes on their skin, lesions on their skin, vomiting — gastrointestinal upsets is probably the best way to put it,” Louisiana Environmental Action Network Executive Director Marylee Orr said. “You name it: headaches, chest pains, things like that. And these are people all across the Gulf, from Louisiana to Florida.”
LEAN has paid for 50-60 patients to have their blood drawn and analyzed. As the results come back, the tests are confirming suspicion.
Ethylbenzene is a potentially cancerous, potentially fetal-harming compound linked to the MC252 oil that gushed out of the Macondo Prospect well. It was found in excess of the NHANES 95th percentile.
Through limited experiments on humans, scientists have found that prolonged exposure to ethylbenzene may result in functional disorders, fluid in the lungs, respiratory and sensory irritation and act as a central nervous system depressant.
At high concentrations, it can cause vertigo, headaches and fatigue.
But ethylbenzene is inhaled by millions of Americans each day via the cigarette.
Whether present-day human exposure is coming from cigarettes, gasoline or other non-spill-related sources, the high levels of the compound that’s being reported found in the bloodstream are not related to the oil spill, Tulane toxicology professor LuAnn White said.
“If they’re measuring ethylbenzene now, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with the oil spill because those solvents evaporated off very quickly from that oil,” White said.
White serves as the toxicology consultant to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals as a volunteer after her funding was cut a few years ago. She has consulted DHH for 20 years and researched and tested for compounds from the oil spill “since the beginning.”
White said blood analysis is a faulty testing method in this scenario because it determines only recent exposures opposed to the prolonged exposure the sick are claiming.
“If you measure it in blood, it means it’s an immediate exposure you’ve had,” she said. “It’s not one you’ve had two or three days ago or two weeks ago. It just doesn’t stay in the blood because the body breaks it down very quickly and you also exhale it. They act very similar to alcohol in their mechanism in terms of dizziness and that type of thing.”
White said the sicknesses are dependent on the individual and each should see his or her own physician for treatment options.
In addition to ethylbenzene, LEAN-commissioned test results have shown high quantities of other volatile compounds that cause dizziness and headaches in the blood of those tested, said Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist who has been monitoring the volatile compounds linked to the MC252 oil near the Gulf’s shoreline while working in conjunction with LEAN.
“What we’re finding is elevated levels of ethylbenzene, xylene and hexane and these are the same chemicals that are associated with the BP crude and that we’re finding in air samples in areas where residual or new oil is washing on shore,” Subra said. “The health impacts associated with these chemicals correspond to the health impacts that the people are experiencing.”
Subra said blood testing gives an accurate depiction of what compounds are actually affecting the body. “There may be other methods of testing,” she said. “This is just the one we selected and the one that we felt would represent what was physically in the body, in the blood.”
Subra pointed to the test results of a 3-year-old who was suffering from symptoms as a counterpoint to the argument that the ethylbenzene was a product of smoking or pumping gasoline. The child’s blood revealed ethylbenzene 3.3 times the NHANES 95th percentile.
The environmental scientist said the reason people are not getting proper treatment is more myopic than sinister.
“When the people do go to the doctor, they treat them for bronchitis or pneumonia and not specifically address the exposure due to the chemicals, so we’re having a difficult time finding medical personnel that will adequately handle those cases.”
What’s in it for him? Perhaps it’s the acclaim, but more likely, it’s just another opportunity for Dr. Mike Robichaux to put his fellow citizens ahead of himself in a time of crisis.
Robichaux, despite the onslaught of criticism his decision could elicit, began drawing blood to test for Volatile Organic Compounds from the veins of people from across the Gulf Coast who claim to be ill from spill-related compounds.
“I’m tickled pink that they’re coming here,” Robichaux said. “It puts me right in the middle of the whole thing. I’m elated. I don’t have to go out looking for trouble; it’s coming to me. …This is heaven to me.”
Three weeks ago, on a Thursday morning in his Raceland office, Robichaux drew blood from seven people: the Doomm family of four, who live “70 feet” from Navarre Beach on the Florida panhandle and three men who worked in the Vessels of Opportunity program. There was no charge.
The blood samples will be shipped to a lab in Duluth, Ga., where they will be analyzed in an approximately three-week long process. The transportation and blood analysis costs $245, a tab that the Louisiana Environmental Action Network has paid to this point.
The Lafourche Parish Council passed a resolution asking its district attorney to see if part of the $1 million the parish received from BP after the oil spill can be used to fund the transportation and analysis.
As a day job, Robichaux works as an ear, nose and throat doctor and boasts a patient database that stretches from Grand Isle to Thibodaux. But there is much more to the family doctor than stethoscopes and ear exams.
A self-described prolific reader, Robichaux reads five newspapers a day. He has scanned dozens of books into his computer, which is outfitted with an optimal recognition feature that can search for phrases at the snap of his fingers.
He prefaced his address to the Lafourche Council the same way he did the patients he was about to help. “There’s probably not anybody in the state that read more on the subject of the spill than I did. I read five papers a day; I cut out clippings of them. I laminated every page of every paper of these five papers.”
Well, not every page; only the ones with spill-related stories and only until the fumes from the lamination machine began to make him feel woozy.
Still, he stresses, he’s well-versed in the issues stemming from the spill: the lost jobs, the oil-soaked wildlife, mashes and beaches, the lax safety practices, the Vessels of Opportunity and the summer-long chronicled debate of whether dumping chemicals into the Gulf was the safest way to clean it.
Absent from the articles, the public’s consciousness and his own, was what affect the chemistry project going on in the Gulf would have on humans – the combination of more than 150 million gallons of oil, 1.8 million gallons of Corexit dispersant and subsurface injections of methanol.
“Until just a few weeks ago, I had not seen a single person that I was convinced had a problem from the oil spill,” Robichaux said. “Not one, OK? I started getting calls from some environmental friends of mine in Baton Rouge that said, ‘Look, Mike, would you mind drawing some blood on these people? We’re convinced they’re having problems.’
“I’m still a little skeptical about this because I’m not going to put my reputation on the line until I’m absolutely certain. That’s where we stood with this. They had three or four other people that were there and it was a little confusing that day. I was supposed to biopsy that diver’s glands and some other people came over there and they wanted blood drawn at the same time. It got very confusing.”
In total, Robichaux drew blood from four males and a female. The results, posted by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, showed each of the five blood samples had ethylbenzene, among other compounds, in excess the NHANES 95th percentile.
Bookshelves line three walls of Robichaux’s home office, his command center, but it’s still not enough space to hold his literature. Books lay scattered across his desk, which also supports two computer monitors and a DVD copy of “Idiocracy,” a gloomy forecast of a future world inhabited by a devolved and uneducated human race.
While searching for something of interest, he becomes frustrated. He can’t find it. It’s not in the files of his prescription drug price research, nor in the boxes that house the contents of cold murder cases he says he has solved. At last, he has it in his hands – a self-produced DVD documentary of the Alliance of Concerned Citizens, which Robichaux founded in the mid-1980s.
Amidst rumor of conspiracy in the late 1980s, the ACC held forums and made the rest of the public aware that former Lafourche Parish Sheriff Duffy Breaux was lax on law enforcement and heavy on lining his pockets. Born from the ACC’s outcry, the FBI launched an investigation that culminated in Breaux pleading guilty to multiple charges in 1993.
During the ordeal in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Robichaux and other members of the ACC were publicly defamed and subject to violence. Robichaux’s office was sprayed with bullets from a 9mm pistol and his boathouse was torched.
Robichaux revived the ACC last year in the aftermath of the oil spill and has held meetings related to the health concerns at his house across the street from his Raceland office.
Robichaux digressed several times in the process of telling the tale of his involvement in the present-day issues, and like a world-class novelist, his supporting stories carried the same theme: even good people can be compromised by the pressures of politics and big business.
He talks about Breaux, a friend who was “compromised” by those around him. Even 18 years after Breaux was arrested, Robichaux makes sure to hammer the point home – Breaux was a friend, but the issues at hand took priority over the friendship.
He talks about Carol Browner, who serves as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change. The ACC has tried to contact Browner multiple times about the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which was enacted in 1976 and amended in 1980 to exclude classifying “drilling fluids, produced waters, and other wastes associated with the exploration, development, and production of crude oil or natural gas” as hazardous wastes.
“We’ve been trying like the dickens to get in touch with Carol Browner, and the politics is so thick in America, and I think she’s compromised,” Robichaux said. “I didn’t see this but somebody said she promoted something that was un-environmentally friendly recently. Just like Duffy Breaux, they get compromised in so many different ways and they don’t know which way is up.”
Marylee Orr said LEAN only knows of two doctors who are conducting blood tests to analyze for volatile compounds – Robichaux and Rodney Soto, a Florida neurologist.
“There are very few physicians who are trained or aware to be able to diagnose or know what to do with some of these folks, and that’s a tremendous problem,” Orr said. “These people feel that they’re not getting better and they’re concerned about what to do.”
Robichaux, despite his charitable efforts, does not know how to read the test results or properly treat the symptoms. And he does not know where to look for help.
It’s not the belief that doctors are being paid off, but it’s the potential for malfeasance that worries him.
“We know that they have problems,” Robichaux said. “We know that they have chemicals in their system, but I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to manage it and so forth. I don’t want to contact anybody locally because they are all compromised.
Naming a local hospital, Robichaux said, “I would semi-trust [them]. I think they’re big enough. That company could buy [a local facility]. They could buy it in a second.”
Next week …
A closer look at the dispersants used to dissolve the oil slick, the Volatile Organic compounds linked to the crude oil and the threat of airborne contaminant inhalation that coastal residents face.
Dr. Mike Robichaux, an ear, nose and throat physician in Raceland, sits in his home office, surrounded by literature and files of his various investigations. ERIC BESSON
