The Wellbeing Twins – Sophie & Gina
My twin sister Gina and I have been suffering with ME / CFS severely for almost a decade now. Between us, we experience a lot of weird and not so wonderful symptoms and they emphasise the complexity of the immunological and neurological disease that is Myalgic Encephalitis. For instance, my sister has bouts of shingles almost every 3 months and I have eczema which can – way too easily – turn into full-body skin infections. Both are equally disabling. But symptoms we both share are chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivity and food intolerances.
We’ve always had ME, MCS and food intolerances as far as we can tell. But in 2016, everything spiralled downwards for us. And to make things worse, we live in London so every day there are road work fumes, vehicle fumes, perfumes / aftershaves and the London underground to contend with! Not to mention high rent prices which adds the toxic burden of stress chemicals to our already overwhelmed systems. So that we are able to breathe on main roads and in the tube, we invested in French made anti-pollution masks, the sort which you would usually see cyclists wearing. And they are an absolute God-send! They make life so much easier, but they don’t protect us from everything and to avoid breathing in perfumes, we wrap a scarf around our masks. That usually does the trick but makes breathing harder! And no amount of protective gear could distract from the hazy thick toxic swamp that we find ourselves in daily. As Dr Hyman beautifully puts it: “We are exposed to 6 million pounds of mercury and 2.5 billion pounds of other toxic chemicals each year… The simple truth is that we are living in a sea of toxins and it is destroying our bodies and brains.”(1)
We’ve been restricted to eating only 5 foods for around 3 years due to gut and immune dysfunction – chicken, ginger, lettuce, cucumber and olives. We’re hoping this will change this year and we can return to eating a more well balanced and plant-based diet, without needing to rely on meat which is full of hormones and other chemicals.
This year already we’ve seen a slight but significant improvement in our energy levels and that’s made us put our heads together and decide that enough is enough, we’re leaving London! We have settled on Oxford and we’re doing everything we can to put our energy towards moving there.
No living thing, be it animal or botanical, is meant to breathe in and absorb this toxic pollution swamp and our bodies have been telling us for the longest time to escape. And now we are making our great escape a reality.
We have a website where we tell our stories in depth, called the Wellbeing Twins – wellbeing is what we’re striving to achieve and hopefully we will this year!
