General Clean-up from the Neuropathy Association

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General Clean-up from the Neuropathy Association

If you find yourself spending more time at home due to less mobility and more

pain, taking care of a few important things at home in advance may help keep

your household from becoming overwhelming later.

The following are a few general clean-up tips:

If clean-up over whelms you, start small. Take one drawer and completely dump it

out on a table. As you clean it, methodically decide: keep or save. Do I use

this? If not, toss it or Goodwill it. Start in the kitchen, start in your

bedroom, but start. Clean out a drawer a day.

Take a long, thoughtful look at the adorable art drawings and sto­ries your kids

brought home from grade school, cement them in your mind, and return them to

their creators. They'll either love reminiscing, or they won't care and will

toss them. In any case, they won't be cluttering your closets any more.

Clean with green. You can find all-purpose kitchen cleaners that are plant- and

mineral-based and biodegradable. Cleaners with carcinogens and glycol ethers

found in commercial products need to go. Glycol ethers, commonly found in

products that eliminate grime, can be responsible for nerve damage as they are

readily absorbed into the skin.At the very least, use rubber gloves.

Be careful using:

Bleach or phosphoric acid. Lung irritants. - Butyl Cellosolve. Can damage your

nerves. Found in glass cleaners.

Phosphate. Harms rivers and lakes. Found in dishwasher detergent.

Stick with products containing no dyes, no detergent, no bleach or perfumes.

Cleaning Plain and Simple, a book by Donna Smallin, is loaded with great tips to

help you cleanbefore you have a rainy day (like a bad patch of neuropathy). This

book comes up with answers on how to prior­itize your chores and clever

strategies to get work done efficiently.

365 Tips is a weekly e-mail service brought to you by The Neuropathy Association

in cooperation with DemosHealth publications and author Mims Cushing. It is

based on and features excerpts from the new book, You Can Cope with Peripheral

Neuropathy: 365 Tips for Living a Full Life, by Mims Cushing and Norman Latov,

M.D., Ph.D.