Lead Poisoning

real_pochacco

My girlfriend thinks she has lead poisoning. She was scraping lead based paint off an old house to make some cash over the summer, and she did it for about 14 hours before she started wearing a mask, etc., so she inhaled a lot of it.

It's been several months, though. Her main complaints are a weird tingling in her legs and she says that she's felt cognitively fuzzy for a while now. She also gets headaches fairly frequently.

What do you think?

bowen

She's got a cold, the flu, or some sort of other ailment.

Feral

Tingling in the legs and cognitive "fuzziness" can be symptoms of all sorts of things. Anemia comes immediately to mind - and is very very common in reproductive age women for obvious reasons.

However, since she was exposed to lead on a job site, she should definitely get tested. It's probably not lead, but it doesn't hurt to get a blood test. Go to any GP - preferably a 'normal' one and not an 'alternative' or 'holistic' practitioner, for reasons I'll outline below - and get tested for it. At the same time, the doctor can look into other more likely possibilities.

The reason you don't want to go to an alternative, holistic, chiropractic, or homeopathic practitioner (besides the majority of them being quacks) is because a lot of those people make their money using faulty or excessively sensitive tests for lead or mercury poisoning and then selling you on overpriced chelation therapy. Chelation quackery is very common, so just find a regular old general practice doctor to go to.

Gabriel_Pitt

If she's got a problem, it's related to something other than lead. Actual lead poisoning requires repeated exposure allowing it to build up in the body. Unless she was grinding up the paint and snorting it, a brief, one time exposure like that is highly unlikely to have exposed her to enough lead particles to suffer lead poisoning.

real_pochacco

Gabriel_Pitt wrote: »

If she's got a problem, it's related to something other than lead. Actual lead poisoning requires repeated exposure allowing it to build up in the body. Unless she was grinding up the paint and snorting it, a brief, one time exposure like that is highly unlikely to have exposed her to enough lead particles to suffer lead poisoning.

She was basically doing that, yeah. She breathed in enough to get severe headaches from the paint dust. She was also scraping paint off the house for quite some time.

The tingling in her legs has been going on for months now, so it's definitely not a cold.

MrDelish

real_pochacco wrote: »

Gabriel_Pitt wrote: »

If she's got a problem, it's related to something other than lead. Actual lead poisoning requires repeated exposure allowing it to build up in the body. Unless she was grinding up the paint and snorting it, a brief, one time exposure like that is highly unlikely to have exposed her to enough lead particles to suffer lead poisoning.

She was basically doing that, yeah. She breathed in enough to get severe headaches from the paint dust. She was also scraping paint off the house for quite some time.

The tingling in her legs has been going on for months now, so it's definitely not a cold.

she was snorting it?

But like people have said, she should just get tested for it as it's probably something else.

supabeast

She should be seeing a doctor for the symptoms, but unless she was scraping away at some kind of super-concentrated paint that was custom-made to kill someone else, she didn’t get lead poisoning in fourteen hours. Of course, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t exposed to some other weird pigments.