Well… last night we had a horrid adventure. Everything seemed normal (or as close to normal as it gets around here, which is not very) when all of the sudden I was hit by this wave of intense back pain and then chest and stomach pain. I’ve had these types of spasms before but not in a long time.
It was a horrendous level of pain that makes you want to scream but all I could do was whimper and moan as quietly as possible so as not to disturb other campers. Brett helped me to decontaminate quickly and suggested we hop in the car to see if getting away from our campsite would make a difference.
We didn’t get very far before our rental car started smoking! We weren’t sure what it was so Brett just coasted down the hill back to our campsite as carefully as possible. (It turned out it was just that the breaks had overheated.) All the while I was still groaning and crying as though I was in labor.
We wondered if some terrible biotoxin blew through our campsite or if this was the ferocious detoxification that Erik Johnson talks about, where the body senses that it’s in a safe place and starts unloading accumulated biotoxins at a faster and faster rate. We weren’t sure how to tell.
The pain did not abate for quite a while but when I woke up this morning it was gone replaced by an extreme exhaustion and a feeling of weakness. Every movement took so much effort and it almost hurt just to hold a pair of pants for a few seconds.
A little while later, a new couple drove into the campground and my throat immediately started tightening. They parked in the only available spot, right next to our tent! Uh oh!
We decided to drive into Stovepipe campground for Brett to make a work related call and to see if we could contact Sara Mattson, a recovered biotoxin illness sufferer we’ve been with. We didn’t get a hold of her but we decided that we should try to move campgrounds because it seemed like a very real possibility that someone or something had contaminated our site.
As we drove out towards the new campground I started to feel worlds better. It was amazing! There were no other human beings as far as the eye could see. And I was suddenly happy, laughing and felt a sudden burst of energy. The fact that this wonderful feeling was even possible confirmed to us that there really was something wrong with our campsite and my symptoms were not just detox.
Sadly, when we reached the new campground I started feeling worse again. So we decided to turn around and go back. Sure enough I felt better until we started approaching our campsite again.
If we didn’t have the victory stories of other sufferers to guide us we might have given up right then because it was obvious that my sensitivity was going up not down. After all, today I was instantaneously reacting to cars and people who passed by quickly several feet away from me.
Thankfully, we know that this is just what is supposed to happen. Sensitivity goes up at first, allowing you to get even better at doing avoidance thus giving the immune system a complete break and eventually decreasing reactivity. This is exactly what happened to others who chose this path to health. They call it intensification and it most definitely is intense!
There’s no going back now! Once the process takes off it often becomes impossible to return to normal life in a city for quite some time. That’s okay though, we knew what we were getting into, though of course we hoped things would turn out to be easier for us. People are watching and we’re not going to quit. They are drawing hope and courage from our story, so how could we ever let them down?
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