Don’t take the light lightly.

Ella was three when it began.

Her preschool would call. They’d tell me that she couldn’t lift her head from her desk. She was vomiting. She was ill.

Each time, I’d dash to her school to bring her home. The vomiting would last for hours and she was obviously in great pain. The episodes became more frequent until this was pretty much our daily routine.

It was amazing how blasé teachers were about the whole thing. “Subsequent rounds of the flu,” was their easy assessment.

I was baffled and overwhelmed. We explored everything from food allergies to seizure disorders to you name it. The list of medical professionals we’ve seen daunts even medical professionals. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

I knew only one thing: Ella never got sick at home. If this illness was something within her, it wouldn’t differentiate between environments. This was something that happened in specific places, and it seemed to happen most often in her school. So I began making a list, as you would if you were exploring a food allergy, of everything that she was exposed to whenever she became ill. Was it their carpeting? Something she ate at school lunch? Was it emotional?

And then one day an act of grace came my way, as acts of grace often do, through the craziest and least expected venue. It came not from the neurologists but from a landscaper.

For no apparent reason, because I rarely talked to anybody about it, I told him about Ella’s illness. “Oh, I know her school,” he eagerly chimed in. “Yeah, I used to be an electrical engineer and I helped do the lighting install for her school. Man, they were the cheapest people we’d ever worked with.”

He was only gossiping at this point. And then he said the thing that stopped me cold: “That school was so cheap, when they revamped the lights, they kept the old ballasts in place but installed high-speed electronic bulbs. So their fluorescent lights flicker like crazy and they gave me massive migraines. Made me sick as a dog. Had to quit the project.”

Light? People could get sick from LIGHT?

“Yes,” the neurologist later affirmed. “Light-triggered migraines are very real. There’s no cure but it can be managed. The best thing is to avoid triggers.”

But when the trigger is light: how does a living being avoid LIGHT?

Needless to say, the ill-lit pre-school was already ancient history for us. But knowing what to avoid is not the same as knowing what is safe or healthy. I was in the dark on every level.

So we learned by trial. I stopped working. Ella stayed home with me. We’d go out into the world and sometimes she would be well and sometimes she’d get sick. I hired an assistant to help me clean up the vomit. ( If a migraine isn’t managed early, the vomiting can go on for up to six hours.) Ella and I made lists of places that were safe and those that made her ill. We planned our lives around these safe havens. This is how we picked our church, school, playdates, restaurants, shopping haunts … even doctors.

Ultimately, everything that emits high levels of UVA/UVB radiation can make my daughter very ill. This includes fluorescent lights, compact fluorescent lights, stadium lights, mercury vapor lights and — when the UV index is high — sunlight.

This is one of those circumstances where knowledge really has been power. Understanding the triggers, we now manage this illness better. Ella turns eight this month. She still gets ill, but it isn’t daily any more. We are blessed with a school district and a school nurse that are responsive. And I’ve learned more about lighting, electricity and radiation than most suburban moms should ever know.

Perhaps the oddest thing however, is that I’ve begun to see evidence that Ella’s illness, this strange and oddball illness, is becoming increasingly less odd. Not so long ago, people believed that the effect of radiation on the human body was basically thermal — a warming effect.

In today’s world, our bodies are blasted with unprecedented levels of radiation in many forms: UVA/UVB, RFR EMR, the list goes on thanks to WI-FI and cell towers and compact fluorescent lights and other culprits. And what science has now been able to measure is that radiation doesn’t just warm up the body, it changes the body. It mutates cell structure. It mutates DNA.

Not long ago, Dr. Martha Herbert, a Pedicatric Neurolgist with Mass. General Hospital and Neuroscientist with Harvard, wrote about the link between radiation and Autism. It is a heady paper but her conclusions and evidence are substantive. The implications extend beyond Autism, I believe, to many neurological disorders. I’m including that link here for anybody who might be helped by the information:  http://electromagnetichealth.org/electromagnetic-health-blog/herbert-lausd/

It is my hope that some bypasser along this blog post might read our story, or read Dr. Herbert’s paper, and feel — as I did when an electrical engineer-turned-landscaper unknowingly put us on a new path — that grace comes in many forms, and often in heavy disguise.

Health and healing to all.