Smart Meters - Public Service Commission

can’ think straight out because of smart meter. I don’t feel like to eat because of sick every day. I went to Los
Angeles, CA for visiting my sister and feel clear up my mind and restore my heath but I have to go back to my
home and come back to sick again. Donna Avent, Taft, CA (Kern County)
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Though I never was electrically sensitive before, an extreme exposure to Electro Magnetic Frequencies (EMFs)
from just one of PG&E’s digital SmartMeters, (from 10/31/09 to 3/3/10), left me as an electrically sensitive
person. Along the way, the experience of dealing with PG&E to take the SmartMeter out was truly creepy. Now,
a year after the SmartMeter was removed, 30% of the symptoms still rule my life.
Here is the sequence of events: In early December 2009, I began experiencing nights of fitful sleeplessness. I
soon had less and less energy in the day time. I began having localized headaches and worried why I was
constantly a bit dizzy. In January the dizziness became worse and I began feeling very oddly ‘spaced out’. I
began having strange strong cramps in my legs at night that woke me up. My eyes were constantly extremely
itchy and incredibly light sensitive, often with strong pains in my right eye. My normal mild tinnitus was far
far worse. Also my familiar chest pressure and pains were far more pronounced and far more often. I had no
idea these things were related. At first I just felt guilty I had allowed myself to get so out-of-shape that I could
not find a solution to the horrible insomnia. By January I had such serious memory problems I often could not
remember what I was doing from one minute to the next. I would find myself standing still, staring into space,
and vaguely realizing that something must be wrong with me. By February, when speaking, hard as I tried, I
could not remember the most common words, and was spelling words phonetically. Also, the stutter I had as a
child began to return.
By the end of February I realized I was becoming more and more dizzy as the days went by. One day I was so
dizzy, I literally could not walk and was actually staggering. Also, by then, I frequently saw in the mirror that
my face was Bright Bright Red. And since I had no feeling of being hot, I finally knew something was really very
wrong and that the cause was not insomnia. But I had absolutely no idea what the cause could be. It is only
because of two purely chance incidents that I discovered the cause was just one SmartMeter seven feet below
my bed.
In January and again in February a friend using my garage as a theater rehearsal space, twice came upstairs to
the apartment to tell me that as a person who rarely got headaches, he could not figure out why lately
whenever he was in the garage he would get horrific headaches. But, as it turns out, he had been sitting and
standing about ten feet from the SmartMeter.
Through this whole experience, there were two ambulance trips to the emergency room for racing heart. Both
times at the onset I was in no stress whatever. When the pills that are supposed to slow the heart rate down did
not work, I had no choice but to call an ambulance. Both times, at the hospital, my heart checked out just fine.
The first time was before the SmartMeter was taken out. The second ambulance trip to the ER was one
morning 6 weeks after the SmartMeter was taken out. I had been sitting for a few hours at my desk 25 feet
from a power pole. This was the day I realized that even though the SmartMeter had been taken out, it had left
me as an electrically sensitive person and I could no longer use that office or enjoy that roof garden as I had for
the past 30 years.
For this whole past year since the SmartMeter was taken out, I have had to completely interrupt my culturalexchange
business and personal life to only focus on finding ways to shield myself from EMFs. Every day is a
fight. It is serious stress. I am on constant overwhelm. Lately the symptoms are worse again. The strange leg
muscle cramps are waking me up again at night. In this past year I have lost half of my hair. The tinnitus is
worse and worse in just the last few weeks. There are fewer and fewer places I can go, out of the house, to avoid
EMFs that do not make the Tinnitus worse. I worry a lot about cancer and the health of my neighbor’s
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