A “Bug Lady’s” Life

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Dec. 18, 1998 | 10:01 a.m.

1. The picture

In the snapshot, Heather Errthum doesn't look particularly brave. She looks, hmm, what's the word ... determined, maybe. Yeah, that's it. Curled on a couch, long brunette hair tumbling, she's drawing cartoons. She's resting her left elbow on her knee, holding her forearm straight up to accommodate the IV needle that enters it just below the wrist. From there, a yellow tube stretches out of the frame.

So right away you know something's wrong. Still, her pose says it's not that bad, that she's, yes, determined to carry on with the ordinary course of her life, which means writing and drawing children's stories, and this old thing, this stupid needle, well, it's just there to be dealt with. So, no, at first glance you wouldn't say she looks especially brave. But a snapshot is just a thin cross-section of time, and there's only so much it can suggest of the story that flows backward and forward from it.

2. The sick girl

OK, now, imagine that your surroundings are out to get you. That they really want to mess you up. The carpet on the floor, the wood in the walls, the hair on a cat, the very food you eat.

Imagine such a childhood. Imagine being born with a screwed-up pancreas; with a dark rainbow of ailments that keep you in the hospital for about two weeks of every month -- don't even think about what it's costing. Imagine that something (revealed many tests later to be pesticides) has ravaged your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to the chemicals in the carpet, the outgassing of the wallboard, the allergens in the cat hair. Imagine having to eat baby food long after you were a baby because actual food made you sick. Imagine, later in life, having to frequently take nourishment through feeding tubes. Imagine having to gulp cups of baking-soda water to soothe your hot sweats and bad reactions. Imagine the veins in your hand finally collapsing from too many IVs. Imagine having diarrhea all the time . Oh, and you're asthmatic. Imagine such a childhood. Imagine all that and you still can't grasp what it must be like to be Heather Errthum, because you can't imagine that this story has a happy ending, and it does.

3. The trailer

Errthum is pretty perky for someone made ill by almost everything. Her hands flutter excitedly. Her speech has, like, a gushing, almost girlish quality, even when she's, like, reeling off facts about the dangers of pesticides.

Just now she's sitting in a chair in her specially built home in Henderson's Seven Hills neighborhood, calmly recounting her story and trying vainly to control her rambunctious great Dane, "the one creature I'm not allergic to."

"I was in the hospital two weeks every month until I was 17," Errthum, now 27, says. "I saw 187 doctors in 17 years." The anecdotes have a polished feel to them; she's told her story many times, to newspapers, classrooms and, obviously, doctors. Stories about how, when she was growing up in Wisconsin, her mother had to mulch, peel and specially prepare Errthum's food in hopes it might sit easily in her stomach this time. About how she tried, among other desperate therapies, coffee enemas. About how she weighed 92 pounds at 22.

Remember the boy in the bubble? John Travolta played him in that movie. He suffered from an environmental affliction, every passing spore, pollen, germ, gas and microscopic villain triggering a nasty response. That's a lot like what little Heather had.

"She had a lot of problems," says Linda Bausch, Errthum's mother. "We had to keep her in a sort of bubble in the house; she had her own special room and everything."

Errthum's teen years were the worst, Bausch recalls, because her daughter was determined to spend them as a regular teen. "She got really sick as a teenager, and it was just because she rebelled. She wanted to go places with her friends, go eat pizza, go to all those places, and she couldn't. When she did, she got really sick. That was the roughest time for her."

Finally the chain of physicians led to an environmental-medicine clinic in Dallas, where she was supposed to spend a few weeks isolating her problem. "I was in there 22 weeks instead," she says. "It took 14 weeks of testing just to identify 13 foods I could eat."

And so the cause of her ailment was made clear: contamination by bug juice. "Seven different kinds of chlorinated pesticides," she says, and although she could no doubt explain what chlorinated pesticides are -- she's become fluent in the lingua franca of insect poison -- she doesn't bother. Just say it's bad stuff. And the diagnosis came with a grim irony attached: Errthum's father is a corporate farmer -- 40 farms, thousands of acres -- and therefore a major user of pesticides. Because Errthum focuses relentlessly on the positive, on her self-designated role as a take-charge nonvictim, she skirts the issue of her father's complicity in her condition. After all her misery, she doesn't want to hurt anyone else. She hints that he had some anguished, guilty moments, but they didn't drive a wedge between father and daughter.

The diagnosis also meant this: isolation. Becoming a girl in a bubble. She had to find a clean environment and stay there, give her immune system a breather. So, in 1994, she entered a special 12-by-52-foot metal trailer several miles from home. "We gutted it," she says. Installed tile and wood flooring. "Then we introduced one thing at a time. We kept charts to figure out what I couldn't handle." They brushed seven coats of sealer on the walls and kept the air-conditioning running to filter the air.

Errthum spent more than three years in there. "And that's what I needed," she says. Her system began slowly to reknit itself. "That trailer saved my life."

Don't let the phrase "she spent three years in there" give you the impression that she spent three years only in there. The word "determined" applies here, too, because she was determined not to be a girl in a big steel bubble, determined to carry on with the ordinary course of her life. So sometimes she left the sanctuary of her trailer, going out into the great big world full of things trying to mess her up. She'd go to Target, even though she knew she'd be sick all night. Visit the family for as long as she could take it. "In the winter (when the air was cleaner, less freighted with allergens) I went out and did a lot of stuff -- my health problem certainly didn't fit my personality!"

She's still that way! That snapshot? Taken in a South Carolina motel room last summer. Just this month she went to the Billboard Music Awards. "I got sicker than a dog, I had hot sweats all night -- but I had to see Shania Twain!"

Q: Do you think of yourself as brave?

A: I'd say I'm positive. There's something different about me. Because a lot of people are sick like me and haven't done the things I've done; they don't seem to be getting better. I've never looked at it as if I couldn't get better. People say I'm tough as nails, so I figure I must be.

4. The book

Go back to the snapshot for a minute. Instead of the IV, focus on what she's doing: drawing. The cartoony characters are from her self-published children's book, "Something's Buggy." A children's book, that is, about the safe, pesticide-free way to handle bugs. In it, a family learns bug spray is making them sick. By the end -- because Errthum is positive -- they get better.

There were surely several reasons she wrote the book: as a defiant gesture to her illness, no doubt, a symbol of her unwillingness to let her body defeat her spirit; but, mostly, as something to do! Imagine being stuck in a sterile trailer day after day. You'd get -- well, let's just say it: You'd get buggy! "I was depressed for six months," Errthum says.

"I wrote poems and was doing the art thing," she says. For a Wyoming family whose children were experiencing environmental ailments, Errthum wrote an encouraging poem. The family loved it, told her, You have to draw a poster to go with it!

From that, "Something's Buggy" was born. Errthum sold it to the many people she'd met with illnesses like hers. At first she made color copies of the pages, but at some point she realized "Something's Buggy" would have to be printed, an expensive proposition. She begged a little charity from the printer and a down-payment from her dad, and one day in 1996, she had 10,000 copies of her book.

She couldn't put them in her trailer, you understand -- the ink made her sick. Imagine having to avoid your own labor of love. Nor was that her only problem: "I was totally in debt, I had 10,000 books and no way to sell them." She couldn't sell them through bookstores -- ignorant of publishing basics, she hadn't secured an ISBN number.

She started giving talks about pesticides in schools and selling the book there. The first time: "There were 32 kids and I sold 'em all a book. I said, 'I made $110 today! This is what I want to do!"'

So that's what she's done. She got herself some bugs and puppets and a 45-minute routine about pesticides and natural pest remedies and now she visits schools -- most of which, by the way, regularly spray for bugs, meaning most visits make her woozy. She wrote and sang an accompanying cassette tape, "Rompin' Remedies." It is very sweet.

And now she is the Bug Lady, so known to the 62,000 kids she addressed last year, and that is a big part of her happy ending. "I'll be walking down a street somewhere and a kid will come up and say, 'Aren't you the Bug Lady?' " The message is getting out; the mail from kids proves that. The book also contributed to her ongoing recovery in another way: "It's paid for my medical bills," she says. Well, most of them, anyway.

Now she's redrawing "Something's Buggy," gonna put an ISBN number on it and everything this time (it's still self-published) and plans to have it out by the end of January.

5. The house

No termites were harmed in the construction of Errthum's happy ending. You know this from another snapshot. It shows the foundation of this very house during construction; someone has painted the words "No termite" on the concrete, meaning Don't spray for termites. Also, "Do not use any OSB ply," meaning Don't use pressboard.

Those are two of several modifications that have made this unassuming tract home Heather-safe. This is her bubble now. "They gave us a product list, things that make her ill," Lee Venable, division manager for Kimball Hill Homes, says. His company built the house with special paint and drywall materials, "using plywood instead of pressboard ... ceramic tile ... no fiberglass ... Then we stood guard and made sure it all happened," he says.

"I was thrilled at the house," Bausch says. "I couldn't believe it had absolutely no smell. We went into an awful lot of houses and there was always that new house smell."

Errthum came to Las Vegas seven years ago. Something about the desert air made her ... hungry. "I ate more in, like, a week of being out here than I ever had in my whole life!" she says. She decided she'd eventually move here, although it would take a while.

With the health benefits in mind, her fiance, Larry, "literally forced me out here" this year. Seven Hills -- perched way out on the southern rim of the valley -- offered the clean air and pollution-clearing wind patterns they sought.

And now life imitates self-published children's book -- the main character heals. "I feel so much better now," Errthum says. That's the biggest part of her happy ending right there. Emboldened, she leaves the windows open. Feeling grand, she takes the dog for a walk. But she realizes her limits. "I can only stand to be down in Las Vegas for about an hour and a half," she sighs.

6. The dog

The dog is part of Errthum's story, too, part of her happy ending. His name is Brisbane, after the Australian city Heather and Larry had hoped to visit but couldn't. Brisbane's ears have just been bobbed, or sheared, or tweaked or whatever you do to a show dog's ears to make them show-dog ears. Consequently, he looks like he has antlers. He shakes his head violently and sticks his great snout into the laps of visitors and slides around on the nonallergenic wool rugs that Errthum can't stick down because the adhesive makes her sick. She clearly loves him.

Brisbane is a wet-nosed symbol of her drive to be upbeat, no girl in a bubble. She's determined to carry on with the ordinary course of her life, pets and all. Sure, she still has to have extensive blood work every few months, but check this development: "There are, like, 32 foods I can eat now," she says. Imagine being able to eat 32 foods!

"You have to accept that if you can't do something, you can't do it," she says. "So you do something else.

"There are hundreds of things I still can't tolerate," she explains. Simple vinyl blinds in her dream home, for goodness sake -- had to be replaced with aluminum. Then there was this soap. It smelled so wonderful! She knew, she knew it would make her sick, but she thought maybe she'd gained enough ground on her condition to handle it, so she had Larry buy her some. Nope. Couldn't sleep. Hot sweats. Feeling miserable. "I said, 'Larry, you've got to get the soap out of here.' Sure enough, within an hour, I was sleeping like a baby." Errthum laughs, delighted by one more happy ending among many, and reaches for another snapshot.

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