I lived for 4 1/2 years in an apartment that had to be gutted and inspected by some environmental office or other prior to me moving in. Anytime I took a hot shower or boiled water on the stove, brown goo ran down the walls that smelled like cigarette tar. While living there, I ended up bedridden for about 3 1/2 months and spent about a year at death's door. I had a long history of respiratory and other health issues which had been largely blown off by doctors for most of my life. This crisis led to a cutting edge diagnosis of "atypical cystic fibrosis" (relatively mild compared to the traditional diagnosis, but still potentially deadly).

While living there, I was frequently in the ER. I went through a couple of periods where I ended up in the ER very routinely, within about 48 hours of coming off of antibiotics. Doctors told me point blank that "people like you don't get well". I had managed my condition without a diagnosis for many years (I was nearly 36 when I was diagnosed) so, in frustration with getting no real support from doctors, I began doing my own research and trying to improve on what I was already doing.

Eventually, I found that when I could feel a crisis coming on and was clearly deteriorating, washing all the curtains and throw rugs and so forth sometimes was effective in keeping me out of the ER. Eventually I concluded that if I did more washing proactively instead of waiting for a crisis, maybe I could avoid those crises altogether. This led to a period of some months where I spent all day Saturday, every Saturday in a laundromat washing about 20 loads of laundry. Yes, my health improved. But I felt like I had no life and was simply a slave to my possessions. I also began to be outraged at the idea that I had spent more money in just a few weeks on washing a throw rug than it would cost to replace it. I began cavalierly throwing out throw rugs and replacing them fairly frequently. Then I decided throw rugs were non-essential items and one could live without them. So were curtains. I began tossing out such belongings rather then spend all my time, energy and money trying to keep them clean enough to keep me out of the ER.

This led to me concluding that if all this washing could help keep me out of the ER, maybe it wasn't just my genes making me sick. Maybe it was also my possessions. I can't change my genes but I can change my relationship to my material possessions. I soon became determined to toss out anything in the apartment that was making me sick. Ultimately, I concluded that everything that had ever been in that apartment needed to go. I methodically threw it all out over the course of several years.

I initially had fantasies that I would get rid of the contaminated items and then get new things which were more spartan and low maintenance. I figured my lifestyle would look fairly conventional but with a clean, modern decor. That was not to be. To this day, I own very little. We (my sons and I -- the oldest of whom has the same diagnosis) have had repeated experiences proving to us how negatively papers impact our welfare. So we just don't go there.

I think this principle generalizes more than most people would like to believe. At one point, I snuck into an empty cubicle at work and removed 3 linear feet of papers left there (covered in dust and essentially rotting in place). I trashed some and redistributed others back to the supply room. Within 2 days of that, I stopped needing to keep Dayquil in my desk at work. But also within 2 days of that, two individuals who shared a wall with the cubicle I cleaned out stopped being ill with a chronic cough and respiratory infections, in spite of the fact that they had been steadily deteriorating and their doctors didn't know why.