Homesick: Living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities

Filmmaker Susan Abod—a professional singer forced to give up her career and dreams due to Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS)—embarks on a journey through the U.S. Southwest to talk with others who have discovered ways to cope with the disease. MCS, Abod tells us, presents as a chronic sensitivity to the toxins that are ubiquitous in our daily lives: treated carpets, paint, cleaners, pesticides, gases, and so on. Symptoms range from constant pain to fatigue, skin burns, nausea, asthma, confusion, fevers, and headaches. MCS makes it extremely difficult for people to live in ordinary homes or work in office environments, although the Southwest is a little easier on sufferers due to wider spaces and less manufacturing. Abod discovers a wide variety of ideas for building homes that largely eliminate (or at least minimize) toxins, including a house on stilts, outdoor bedrooms made of steel and screen, tents, teepees, outside kitchens, and designer homes made entirely of inert materials and heated by hot water pipes beneath floors. The film concludes with Abod's own complicated but ultimately successful efforts to customize a home for herself. Besides learning about alternative homes, viewers are made aware of what people with MCS experience while trying to fit into the world, ranging from the skepticism of doctors to the difficulties of trying to hold a job. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)