Paint it blue

Consideration of paint, painting, and the impact of VOCs upon brain health

PAST

Color vision deficiency test from AOA

From the earliest memories I can recall, my mother would regularly remind me that I was color blind. This was confusing, because I knew that I could see color, but it wasn’t until I was eight or nine years old that I truly understood. I could see colors, but I saw color differently than other people. Even today, I would struggle to tell you what is different for me, although it shows up primarily in the ranges of pink, blue, purple and greens.

I went through a phase in high school where I was something of a fashion plate. Surrounded by rich kids who could casually spend hundreds of dollars on brand names, I was struggling to keep up. It was disconcerting to my Pop pop who alternated between two worn pairs of pants, and would often make barbed comments about what I was wearing on my way out the door. I distinctly remember one morning when I went into Nana and Pop Pop’s bedroom to kiss Nana goodbye before I left for school and she said “Is that what you’re wearing to school today?” I replied “Yes, is there something wrong with it?” She said, “Well, you’re wearing green pants and a pink shirt with blue and white striped espadrilles.” Shit! I thought I was wearing blue and green. And it was too late to change.

For what it’s worth, Pop pop was a moving fashion violation, who could often be seen wearing three different plaids at the same time. The Gap was a very popular store at the time, and I would pick up preppy pants and sweaters on deep discount sales. I had not worn white pants before, nor since that time. I bought a pair of penny loafers from an outlet store. To my pleasant surprise, in our senior year I was voted the best dressed of my high school class. This was in spite of being a poor kid with uber wealthy classmates, and possibly because of the radical color mis-matching decisions I made.

Travis AFB housing

As regular readers know, my wife Kerrie is an artist. She studied oil painting as an undergraduate, and in recent years works as a stained glass artist. This is to say that her perception, organization, and talent with utilizing color represents a zenith of achievement compared to my ineptitude. She grew up in an Air Force family, living most of her life in base housing, where the range of colors on the walls was somewhere between bright white, eggshell, and beige. The first home that we lived in together was a rental unit and we weren’t permitted to paint the white walls, so it was her oil paintings and a few stained glass pieces which brought color to our lives. When we moved into our first apartment in Ithaca, we were able to add some butter yellow to the walls of the dining area and a mint green to the bathroom. When we moved into our current home, we went wild with the colors.

There are three shades of orange in the living room, the dining room has an applied natural plaster surface, which is gray with sparkling mica, and the ceiling is blue. The main hallway is light pink. The room we call Nana‘s room, because that is where she died, is a pale shade of lilac. The paint can said Wisteria. The office/bedroom that you’ve seen me do podcasts from is a bright green with dark green trim. Our bedroom is a dark blue with one wall of light blue. There are three shades of yellow between the kitchen and the bathroom. Then there are plants, paintings and stained glass pieces.

Before we moved into our house, all of the walls were white. The previous family which had built the house in 1956, were smokers. This is where we get into connecting the dots between our delicate brains and the everyday practicalities of harm reduction. Combine cigarette smoke from the inhabitants of a dwelling with the byproducts of combustion from cooking with propane or natural gas, and you end up with a toxic combination that adheres to the walls, ceilings, and all other surfaces for a lengthy period of time. Being an amateur student of HVAC, I understand that the building code in Canada, where the insulation is super-tight requires adequate ventilation, using systems such as energy recovery ventilators (ERVs). Not so in the United States, which results an indoor air quality that is often far more deleterious than the most toxic outdoor air.

Although we had just taken on more debt than we could enjoy, we used some of our remaining cash to make one of the best investment decisions of our life. We spent about $2000 in 2004 on no- or low-VOC paints made by the company AFM Safecoat. There was a lengthy, but enjoyable process of testing colors with pint and quart cans from the local big box and family-owned paint stores, then sending color samples to Brooklyn. The supplier would mix the paints and charge an inordinate amount of money to ship the cans to us. The paint cans often showed up dented and leaking, but most of the paint arrived intact. The first step we took was to use the AFM SafeCoat transitional primer sealer, which is specifically designed to seal in toxins. I think of this along the lines of how asbestos remediation takes place. Either you remove the asbestos with a fair amount of trouble, the workers wearing hazmat suits and having a high degree of ventilation. Or, you seal the asbestos in place.

Yoga Sophie shows off the floor finished with AFM Natural Oil Wax

For the floor finish, we used a product which is not as durable as water-based polyurethane, but which can easily be remediated when there is a stain, and which forms a waxy seal over the wood. It is the AFM Safecoat Naturals Oil Wax Finish. If we had it to do over again, I think that Kerrie would have chosen a more durable, and VOC-laden water-based poly finish. Although hairball-vomiting cats, or water dripping from houseplants can lead to stains on the floor, I don’t mind terribly the remedial sanding and staining with this product.

Kerrie and I were striving to make the inside of our home as healthy as possible for us and the cats. This was motivated in part by losing my father to renal cell cancer in 2000, and thinking that the precipitating event was a remodel in the home he shared with our stepmother. We understood that darker paints inherently meant the presence of more VOCs, and used very little in our palette. If the technology has exceeded that threshold in the last 20 years, I am not yet aware of it. With this in mind, we made one exception to our no-VOC paint approach. We bought an off-the-shelf dark red from Home Depot, which we used to paint our foyer. Twenty years later, we have no regrets.

RECENT PAST

My friend Betsy has post acute sequelae of Covid (PASC) and some of you met her during a live Q&A that I did months ago. She bought a home that needed a fair amount of work before she moved in, including mold remediation. There is no way that she could have readied her home without using a high-quality respirator, low-VOC paints, and an ozone generator to burn off outgassing chemicals. I never knew about using an ozone generator until I met Betsy. The simple story is that it’s something you can buy online for between $50 and $100, which is easy to use. As long as you are careful about protecting your electronic equipment, and avoid inhalation of the ozonated air after use, you can treat rooms after painting or staining and neutralize a lot of the outgassing.

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

https://stballoon.com/

Unless born with birth defects, most human beings are delivered into this world with an enormous amount of reserve capacity. We have two kidneys, three lobes to our liver, five lobes to our lungs, ten fingers and toes, two hands and two feet. When it comes to our brains and our genius capacity, I like to imagine them as big as the colorful helium balloons with wicker baskets that carry tourists to the Fingerlakes each summer. What happens when that reserve capacity is used up?

One of my favorite movies is Something the Lord Made , a dramatization of the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, who met over the seminal research on IV fluid resuscitation. In World War II, there were many young men who suffered grievous injuries and nearly lost their lives due to blood loss. The use of IV fluid for resuscitation and trauma, as a direct result of Blalock and Thomas’ work, had came onto the scene during that war, so that many young lives were saved. What happened thirty or forty years later answers the question asked above—many of those men developed dementia in their fifties and early sixties, several decades earlier than peers who hadn’t suffered serious injury and blood loss. Why is that?

Normal saline solution of NSS is capable of increasing the circulating volume in the body of an injured soldier, sailor or airman, but it doesn’t carry oxygen on hemoglobin. We need red blood cells (RBCs) to do that, and if you’ve lost a lot of blood, you don’t have as many RBCs. The net result for many young combatants in WWII, was a hypoxic injury to the brain, which dramatically reduced the reserve brain capacity. The colorful balloon shrank down to the size of an eagle’s nest. These young men could function normally to the casual observer, exhibiting expected levels of intelligence and cognitive abilities. Their margin of error had shrunk enormously though. Then what happened?

Life happened. They played sports or worked and suffered concussions. They smoked. They had surgeries with anesthesia. They started to take pharmaceutical drugs. They ate a diet which promoted inflammation. They were poisoned by the growing list of chemicals used to clean our homes, create consumer goods, and raise food crops. In essence, they continued to suffer injuries great and small to their brains, until their cognitive capacity was so diminished, that it became obvious.

PRESENT

Here’s the thing that kicks you in the rubber parts. Your brain’s reserve capacity may have dropped from the size of a tourist balloon to the size of , well, your brain, and you won’t know until it drops just a notch further. If you want to pay out-of-pocket to see one of the few awake neurologists, and order some expensive testing, you could have a NeuroQuant MRI. To be honest, the few patients of mine who have had a NeuroQuant MRI were not emotionally well-prepared to handle the news of how much brain capacity they had lost.

The spike protein has devastated our brains and nervous system. People who didn’t get the shots have been inoculated by the shedding of those that did. One thought I have when I hear someone expressing sympathy for those of us who are injured by the Covid shots, “But I wasn’t affected by the virus, and thanks-be-to-God didn’t get the jab”, is “Well, you haven’t seen your NeuroQuant MRI.” The spike protein is a toxic bioweapon which has carried out an insidious chemical injury to our brains. There has been an infinite loss of reserve capacity across the population.

A few weeks ago, in my work at the Leading Edge Clinic, I had a follow up visit with one of my vaccine injured patients. It took a while for the details to come out, but in essence, he and his girlfriend were painting a rental unit, and both suffered an increase in all of their vaccine injury symptoms. Most startling was that she had an episode in which she could not move her arms and he had to slowly lower her to the floor and help her sit up for fifteen minutes until she recovered. When I brought up the likely impact of their paints, he was startled. I asked if they were using low-VOC paints and he said no.

This is one of those cases where life experience has taught me things that I never would’ve learned in school. The best time of the year to paint is when it is warm enough that you can open up the windows. The worst time of year to paint is when your home is shut up tight. The best kind of paint to use is low- or no-VOC paint.

Point 0.0 of healing our brains in post-Covidian times is to avoid further injury. Please take care, catch up, and be thoughtful as you paint your way to a more colorful life. This article from AFM SafeCoat provides a good overview of the true safety profile of products on the market, even those that purport to be zero VOC. I don’t have any financial interest in AFM SafeCoat, but I have a deep and abiding interest in each of you, my treasured readers, and your long-term health.

P.S. Thank you to Charley Crockett for meeting my need for vintage, raw and rootsy country music—and inspiring the title of this Substack.

Paint It Blue, by Charley Crockett, 2020

They say there's a price on my head
And that I'm better off dead
But that sheriff better keep this in mind
I'll sure be hard to find

I give up so much of me
I should probably be charging a fee
You say that you don't like me, and I'm wrong
I bet you're gonna love the way I'm gone

I ain't too concerned with my name
'Cause I know it won't be on my grave
But I ain't gonna hang my head down and cry
'Cause I know where I'm going when I die

The bright lights shining in this city
Remind me of the time when she was with me
It's the same old feeling, nothing new
So, I'm fixing to paint it blue
Blue

I might be down in Texas after a while
Or Louisiana in style
But I'll tell you what I'm really gonna do
I'm fixing to paint it blue
And I'm fixing to paint it blue
Yes, I'm fixing to paint it blue
You know I'm fixing to paint it blue
Lord, I'm fixing to paint it blue