One day, entirely out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone asking if I cared to find out how badly my body is polluted.
I figured it was someone who'd seen me in action at the Red Lion Tavern in Silver Lake, or perhaps Jax in Glendale. But the caller wasn't talking about alcohol pollution.
I was being asked to participate in a biomonitoring study, along with more than a dozen other Californians, to determine how much chemical contamination I carry around with me.
A bill by state Sen. Debra Ortiz (D-Sacramento) calls for voluntary testing as a first step in determining links between disease and the chemicals we're exposed to every day. I said sure to the testing, figuring there had to be at least a couple of columns in it, if not the possibility of having my body designated as a Superfund site.
I've always been curious, too, about the long-term health effect of growing up in the industrial Bay Area town of Pittsburg. Pittsburg was home to Dow Chemical, DuPont, Allied Chemical, U.S. Steel, Johns Manville and PG&E, among other smokestack companies.
They were the lifeblood of the town, putting food on tables for tens of thousands of people. But cancer and respiratory diseases always seemed to keep the mortuary busy.
For my biomonitoring, a Northern California health and environmental research outfit named Commonweal directed me to a lab in Torrance. A nurse there told me she needed 18 vials of blood, a urine specimen and a long clump of hair.
Eighteen vials of blood?
I gave her durable power of attorney and instructed her to yank my feeding tube if I slipped into a coma.
More important, I feared she might be blind, because there is nothing on my head resembling a long clump of hair.
Dizzy with blood loss, I watched in terror as she attacked with a pair of scissors.
"That doesn't look too bad," she proclaimed.
Easy for her to say.
I'm supposed to get the results in May, so if I suddenly disappear from this space, look for me in the Pittsburg mortuary.
Commonweal and the Breast Cancer Fund, which sponsored the bill, already know my body is a 6-foot-2 chemical cocktail, or they wouldn't have asked me to participate.
For starters, they'll find mercury in me, said Commonweal's Davis Baltz. Ditto for DDT and other pesticides, chemicals used as softeners in plastics, and flame retardant chemicals found in carpets, upholstery, ceiling tiles, mattresses and countless other household items.
