When I was born, my great aunt Josephine, said, “Thursday’s child has far to go…” And she was right.

I was so frightened as a child that my mother would give me 25 cents to look up at telephone poles!

And by the time I was 16, I was sitting with my first therapist, a psychiatrist who smoked a pipe and didn’t say much. Yet, through the power of love – offered by so many friends and students and clients, too – I have managed to look up at telephone poles in a host of different places that I have lived, including, the red desert of Alice Springs, Australia, the lavender fields of southern France, high in the Andes mountains in Ecuador, in cosmopolitan Toronto and today in sunny Portugal.

I am grateful for all the loving kindness I have received, which allowed me to heal at a great depth, and then allowed me to discover how I could best help others. I hope that I pay this kindness forward ever day of my life!

As for my professional life, I  have a Master’s in Social Work degree and have studied/been certified in number of modalities, including, Guided Imagery (David Bressler,Ph.D)., Career Planning (Richard Bolles), Emotional Freedom Technique, An Uncompromised Life Hypnotherapy (Marisa Peer) and have taken a number of professional development courses in Trauma Healing through NICABM.

I am passionate about the power of Guided Imagery in healing, and received two grants to introduce Guided Imagery into hospitals in Australia. I was also invited to do a research project studying whether Guided Imagery could increase nursing students’ confidence – and it did!
This research paper was presented at an international nursing conference.
 
I love to be part of mini-documentaries that help people understand multiple chemical sensitivity, as it is much more common than people may realize. I have appeared in documentaries on ABC (USA), ABC (Australia) and BBC (UK).

The Love Story

The Love Story

I was 25 when I walked home in a freezing blizzard. When I got to the red light, and saw my apartment only yards away, I ran. I had to get home. But I did not make it home that night. Instead, I stood under the eye of a neurosurgeon, who was on call in case I needed brain surgery.

Two years later, my doctor announced that the unrelenting nausea that followed the head-on car accident was not simply a result of the accident, but was caused by a sensitivity to chemicals, foods, mold, inhalants and just about everything else. She explained that the only way I would survive was to leave the world…. leave it completely.

At 27, wearing the US government label, ‘permanently and totally disabled’ as a result of extreme chemical sensitivity, I moved into a ‘bubble’, a room with nothing but two chairs and a lamp. I could not leave this room for more than moments a day. – and I did not know if I would ever leave this room.

Then he came to see me. And he liked me! I wondered how anyone could like someone who sat on a chair and did nothing all day. But he looked beyond the ‘bubble’ completely … totally…. and has not stopped loving me ever since.

My book, Love Is The Healer, is a love story.

Love is the Healer

This is the story of my healing journey through extreme Environmental Illness. My years of isolation from the world allowed me to understand my illness from a holistic point of view – how my thoughts, emotions, incidents/traumas from the past were woven into this extreme sensitivity to virtually everything on the earth.

It is the story of the hard work required to heal, but also the story of tremendous grace, most especially in the form of my husband, Cory, who has loved me to a depth that words almost cannot capture, though I tried my best in this book!

Fiel and Friends

I first saw Fiel under a truck. He was so sick, and would not let me touch him at all. I learned that he had been badly abused by his first owner who had died, then was hit by a car, and now had taken sanctuary in a garage owned by a Portuguese man of little means.

 I was determined to help Fiel, and found a vet, who crawled under the truck with me and said Fiel had about three months to live. He gave me medicine and, somehow, I was able to get Fiel to take the pill wrapped in food he liked.

So began another love story, which lasted 3.5 years, long beyond the vet’s prediction.

For 2.5 of those years, Fiel would not let me put one finger on his body, but by the last year of his life, he allowed me to massage him to my heart’s content.

Many would know that once your heart opens to one animal in need, it really can’t close.

Fiel was the first, but many other Portuguese dogs, cats and chickens followed. My work allowed me to pay for these animals’ veterinary care and their food. Fiel died in my arms on November 17, 2018, and here we are the night before he died.