The Michigan Daily Edited and managed by Students at the University of Michigan Thursday, August 5, 1976 News Phone: 764-0552 1111MtIWA4 Kid JOURNAL 5'- On retaining a union THE TIME HAS COME for University clericals to decide whether or not they want to remain unionized. We ~LEN~ believe the clericals should retain the union and give it a chance to establish a good contract from the Uni- versity rather than abolish the fledgling local and de- liver the clericals into the stingy hands of the University administration. Many clerienis are justly angry at their union for some of the evenrs that have befallen them in the past year. Decertifi ,tion advocates and union officers alike agree that Iss summer's contract was inadequate. How- ever, abolishit the union now will not change last year disappointine contract. It will simply dash the best chance clerinlIs have of amending their unsatisfactory situation. Similarly. many clericals have expressed disenchant- ment with the seemingly endless intra-union turmnoll. Again, we do not feel the best solution to this prohlem Is the dismantling of the union. Why not give the newly elected union leadership some time to resolve their dif- ferences, forget old grudges and heal the divisive wounds - of the past year? Surely, if the desire to decertify is evi- dent now and if the union is not effectively functioning = In the near future, the sentiment will still remain. Give , - local 2001 another shot at proving it deserves your uniont! We hope the clericals will vote to keep their union. She's alergic to her carpeting. By GODFREY ANDERSON )ALLAS, TEX. (PNS)-When Carmen Rowley, 42, picks up the telephone, she first wraps it carefully in a handker- chief - not because she is afraid to leave fingerprints, but because she is allergic to the plastic from which it is made. When she reads a book-she prefers secondhand ones be- cause the ink smells less strong - she dons metai-framed spec- tacles and puts the printed page beneath a sheet of glass. Her television is used only at half- hour intervals because of its odor when hot. She can't ride in a car because of the motor fumes and the smell from the plastic interior. Every sip of water she takes must be fil- tered clear of fluoride and other chemicals, while she can eat only a dozen medically ap- proved foods. Even this limited menu must be rotated in a strict timetable every four days. Rowley's problem, believed to be shared by several thousand people throughout the nation, is that she is allergic to almost everything in the chemical tech- nology surrounding us today. "You become very alert to. what is going on in your body and you pay attention to what it says to you," she says of her condition. "Of course, some people can't accept our prob- lem. They think we are not really sick - just psychosomat- ic and imagining things.'"'' R OWLEY'S TROUBLES really got out of hand after the birth of the last of her three children 11 years ago. She blam- es the birth control pills she then started taking for a final flare-up of migraine headaches that soon were forcing her to bed for a couple of days each week, "I was tunder such heavy med- ication that it was all I could do to drag myself around, get the family fed and do the wash- ing and ironing," she said. "I didn't feel I could do anything. I was in and out of the hos- pital where they X-rayed my skull countless times but could- n't find the trouble." But a prominefit Dallas heart surgeon, who also suffered the same incapacitating allergy condition, came to her aid. During a recent five-week stay at the private Brookhaven Medical Center, Rowley under- ed what she could handle. WHEN SItE RETURNED to her home in a comfort- able middle-class suburb, she slept her first night on the tiled bathroom floor, because the synthetic carpeting in her bedroom had not yet been re- moved. Then she made a kind of sanctuary of her bedroom before launching an all-out as- sault on the rest of the house. Up came the carpeting and feet were bare on the wooden floor - "shoes are a special problem," she explained. Asked if her illness had thrown a strain on her marriage, Row- ley said: "My husband has been a brick. Why, he has even tried to give up smoking. After sleeping that first night on the bathroom floor, things can only go up from here" ROWLEY CAME HOME from the hospital with a list of ... and her telephone, her shoes, her- television and even her car's plastic interior. She eats such foods as prunes, pecans, papayas, rabbit and mustard greens. Carmen Rowley, 42, has a problem: she's allergic to life. Ar because of her rare condition, this suburban housewife and mother of three lives within a set of extremely stringent restrictions. Yet, she has hopes and dreams ahead. "Won't it be marvelous to have an egg for breakfast?" she says. Y - :y§',:::; ysass , i. 5- yy . ::; " iv : -ns s5 . ^t s"'.. : 5K5.5:g.i ws-i ; ? so f'g -ac-. went countless tests while liv- out went the synthetic drapes ten foods the doctor said she ing in a strictly controlled en- and bed covers, the vinyl couch, could safely eat. They are soy vironment where the odorless and all of her clothes that con- beans,. mustard greens, red fish, air was filtered through char- tained polyester or any othbr prunes, rice, rabbit, venison, coal, and nurses Wore neither man-made fibers. In came items organic beef, pecans and pa- make-up nor perfumes. Cau- like a plain wooden rocking payas- To these she has since tiously introduced to the foods chair, plain cotton drapes, and added figs to replace the mus- and chemicals she would have a special all-steel electric space tard greens, which are out of to tolerate in daily life-wheat heater that her husband had season, and fresh pineapple, (which contained no chemicals), made from parts of a laundry which she finds she can tol- baking soda, a whiff of tobacco dryer. erate. smoke, alcohol, propane and When I saw Rowley a few '"I have tested "turtle," she chlorine fumes - Rowley learn- days after her return home, her confessed, "and I, think it is OK, but it's very difficult to get and you certainly can't find it at thesupermarket." Another approved food for Mrs. Rowley is guanaca meat (it comes from a kind of South American llama), and she gets this airfreighted from Illinois. It costs $3.45 per pound. Looking ahead, Rowley said: "I hope soon to add coconut as a between-meals snack and I want to test eggs when the hens start laying again. I know a farmer who feeds them organ- ic food without any chemicals. Won't it be marvelous to have an egg for breakfast?" Rowley's doctor believes there, could be as many as sev- eral thousand people throughout the United States who suffer a similar condition without realiz- ing that it is allergy that caus- es it. HE FIRST BECAME sick him self from the gas in his operating theater at one of the big Dallas hospitals. The gas has been cleared to a level he can tolerate. "There are 10,000 chemicals in the environment today and we can't test all of them for all individuals," the doctor ex- plained. "Besides, no two cases are ever exactly the same. Some people react to one thing; oth- ers to another." Saying he reckons it will take another five years for ecologi- cal medicine to become recog- nized in the mainstream of medicine, be added: "At present there are 300 phy- sicians working in the field through the Pan American Al- lergy Association and 90 per cent of them have these allergy problems themselves. There are 150 to 200 more in the Society of Clinical Ecology, and most of them have a chemical prob- lem too. Godfrey Anderson,1a former Associated Press correspondent is a freelance based in Dallas.