All (& only) things that will make others say WTF* No Screenshots! Warning: 7 day ban for violation! No gore allowed - Please read rule 10. Ironically, his favorite color used to be blue he says that preference changed along with his skin.įor more information about argyria, click here.READ THE RULES. "I mean, once you turn blue, you sort of resign yourself to being different," he said. He says he drinks colloidal silver about once a month, still believing it has health benefits.Īnd though Karason claims to have made peace with his argyria, he's recently been using an ionic foot-bath, a totally unproven treatment that promises to rid him of his discoloration.Īnd if there was a proven treatment that he knew would work, Karason says he might or might not take it. But that's what happened to me."īut even as he cautions those 12-year-olds not to do what he did, it might shock you to learn that he hasn't give up the habit himself. Karason's answer to that last question? "It's not something I would recommend you do. Karason is so popular that a young relative of Northup's invited him to visit his sixth-grade class, where the students bombarded him with questions like:Įven this one: "So say I wanted to put that stuff on my face, I could turn blue?" And though he used to be shy, even reclusive, he now enjoys his local celebrity status as "the Blue Man." When he went recently to the Farmers Market in Clovis, Calif., several people stopped and asked to take a picture with him. He regularly goes out in public, enduring the stares of passers-by. Karason later moved to California to be with her and they recently got engaged.Īnd he's decided to embrace his blue-ness. "I kind of went, 'Oh my God! Oh my God!' But I was already in love with the man," she said. Jackie remembers her reaction on seeing Paul for the first time. It began as a telephone romance and it was seven months before they actually met face to face. Until last year, he too lived alone.īut at age 57, he fell in love with a woman named Jackie Northup. She's outraged that, although mainstream medicine mostly rejected colloidal silver decades ago, it's still being advertised and sold as an alternative therapy for everything from HIV to polio and even the common cold.īut it was those very types of health claims that attracted Karason to colloidal silver. And her lifetime of anguish turned her into an activist. Never married, Jacobs lives alone in rural Vermont. "And I know they're afraid I'm going to drop dead." And suddenly, I had the stewardess running over, wanting to know if I wanted oxygen! I'm like, 'No, no, I'm fine, thank you!'" she said. "I was leaving Germany on the plane once. Jacobs said that even well-meaning strangers, seeing her ghostly color, assumed she was going into cardiac arrest. "I've been very, very depressed, and angry," she said, "because I've been called names in the street, by strangers who don't like the way that I look." Jacobs said argyria has changed her life completely. But I go from one unnatural color to another unnatural color." "I've gone to the people that sell the makeup that covers skin blemishes," she said. Jacobs said that makeup wasn't a solution either. "As a result of the dermabrasion, I went from being a solid grey to being a spotty grey," she said. "And that made it difficult to get jobs, to get apartments, and to get dates."īut unlike Karason, Jacobs tried everything - including dermabrasion - to get rid of the blue-grey. "I was facially disfigured when I was a teenager," she said. Ironically, as a white woman, she often suffered discrimination based on the color of her skin. Not everyone who took silver got argyria, but Jacobs was one of the unlucky ones. "He wrote a prescription for nose drops," she said, "and I took them when I had a stuffy nose." She remembers when her own family doctor prescribed it when she was just 11 years old. That's how Rosemary Jacobs of suburban New York became a victim of argyria. As recently as the 1950s, colloidal silver was a common remedy for colds and allergies. Argyria is permanent.Īnd Karason is far from the only one who's used colloidal silver as a medicine. Paul's reaction when he realized he'd turned all blue? "I kind of hoped it would fade off!"īut it didn't fade off.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |