The 'syndrome' in fiction
The novel,
The Invisible Enemy by Alma Katsu, is to be released next year. She mentions it in a very long video:
NSA vs CIA: A Former Analyst Explains the Difference | Alma Katsu (The Team House on YouTube, May 7, 2028 – 1:46:47)
My link is to the approximately 20 minutes specifically about the 'syndrome' and her novel about it, but the rest of it, about working at the NSA and the CIA, is also interesting.
Katsu is a former intelligence analyst who herself had symptoms akin to the 'syndrome' 25 years ago.
Her description sounds much like those of Polymeropoulos in Moscow (and she thinks so, too; coming up). Actually, Polymeropoulos prompted her to write the book. He is obviously still campaigning zealously for the DEW-attack idea, which reminds me of the Danish 'vaccine skeptic',
Christine Stabell Benn, who persuaded a Danish novelist to fictionalize (and idealize) her Guinea-Bissau project as the novel
The Dinosaur Feather.
But back to Alma Katsu's story:
1:09:17--> I woke up and I had complete vertigo. Spin, spin, spin. And the worst head pain of my life. I thought my skull was splitting open.
This went on for nine months. Now, it didn't come out of the blue. There had been I'd had a couple years of continuous problems with my head and pressures and ear and all that kind of stuff. But of course, NSA didn't want to talk to me about it.
However, she doesn't suspect a hostile attack to be the cause. Instead, she points to her work environment at the NSA:
The roof was completely covered with microwave antennas. The walls were riddled with cabling where transmissions are going around you and underfoot.
She may be right, but to me it sounds more like a case of stress combined with
EHS (Wikipedia):
1:10:53—>
– What was the diagnosis that Hopkins gave you for that?
– So 25 years ago the diagnosis is this rare form of migraine called vestibular migraine. Where it affects your vestibular system.
About Polymeropoulos, whom she heard speak at a meeting:
1:12:18—> He talked about his experiences with Havana syndrome and you could have knocked me over with the feather. It was exactly the same, what he went through. The feelings, the headaches, the just crazy. When he finished, I sat down with him and I said, "Look, I'm not saying I had what you had. I'm not saying you had what I have, but this is weird." And he agreed it was weird.
Years later, she had a relapse, went back to (Johns, I assume) Hopkins and – this is interesting – she may have something similar to Minor's syndrome/semicircular canal dehiscence:
1:14:00—> they said, 'You know, we've learned a lot about brains and heads since you were here before'. And they were telling me that they think this condition is, you have to, it's, like, congenital. You have, like, a malformation or a deformity in your head that makes you more susceptible to these kinds of vestibular disturbances.
And it just all clicked into place when they told me that because, like I said, there were other people at NSA who had some of the same physical symptoms that I did, but NSA would always push back and say, "Well, why aren't the other people next to you having the same problems? It can't be real."
I think it's a combination of the effect of the emanations and whether or not you have these congenital problems, whether or not you have malformations that predispose you to this. Here's a, here's an interesting parallel.
When she gets her diagnosis from Johns Hopkins, it is interesting that she sticks to her first suspicion and weaves the two things into one narrative: that it was still somehow caused by the electrical fields in the building and the microwave antennas on the roof. She just happened to be particularly susceptible to them due to her
"congenital problems." It doesn't occur to her that almost
everybody has similar symptoms occasionally, so when her colleagues had them, in her mind, it will also have to have been caused by the environment, the electromagnetic fields.
Even though she is very interested in feminist issues, it doesn't occur to her that the apparently frail masculinity of Polymeropoulos makes him unable to admit to being susceptible to
anything – remember his assumption that the deterioration of his long-distance vision isn't just a normal symptom of aging – and that his way of coping with the problems of age and stress is to blame them on the evil adversary and insist that
his condition is a
"combat injury."
Instead, she has fictionalized the 'syndrome' in a way that confirms it, unfortunately.
The novel might be worth reading for entertainment. I think she's probably a better writer than the one who wrote the last 'syndrome' novel I read. (See
post 2,413.)