I got Jeff to talk a little bit about his days as a furniture refinisher. We were in the car, and sometimes that is the easiest place for insights or trapped memories to emerge from the cognitive nerve tangles.
He couldn’t tell me much—that he and his brother had done work for a dealer when they were in high school or college, that they’d worked on maybe 20 or 30 pieces, and that they’d done so with no precautions and in unventilated conditions. I heard the story in better detail in years past. Then he said “methyl chloride.”
”Methyl chloride?” I repeated. “Is that what the stripper was made of?” Yes. Google methyl chloride and you will find that its more common name these days is chloromethane. It has been used as a refrigerant, a solvent, and an herbicide, but now occurs primarily in industrial chemical processes. It also turns out that it has been deemed sufficiently toxic as to be no longer available in consumer products.
I cannot help but wonder if youthful exposure to a neurotoxin might be just the thing to set a brain up for the decades-long process that results in Alzheimer’s and its variants. Especially in light of my dad’s death from Parkinson’s disease. Dad speculated, after his diagnosis, that perhaps his neurodegeneration was launched in his teen years—when he heaved chemicals out of crop-dusting planes in rural Virginia. Herbicide again. I wonder if it was chloromethane? Not that there aren’t, undoubtedly, dozens of other contenders for things which you shouldn’t spend your youth enveloped in a cloud of.
I’m not trying to be falsely scientific. I can’t know what triggered either of their cases, but my personal hypothesis is that this early chemical buffeting is a strong possibility
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