Guess what y’all? My family is coming to visit us in 11 days! And they’re bringing our dog Ramona to us. Yippee! I can’t wait for all of them to see how much better I’m doing!
Unfortunately, my mold hypersensitivity makes a visit like this rather complicated and there’s a lot of work to be done in preparation. My family is going to have to follow the same decontamination protocols that we have been following.
Additionally, they won’t be bringing anything from their home in upstate New York. Based on my own experience and the experiences of others, upstate New York is a particularly problematic location for biotoxin illness sufferers. This means that their possessions may be contaminated with toxins that are an issue for me.
So today, we headed into town to start gathering supplies for their visit. Our first stop was Target to buy new clothing for each of my family members (three outfits each). As usual, I sat in the car while Brett shopped. The poor guy had to pick out clothes for five people, including my mom and sister!
After 3.5 hours he finally emerged with a cart full of clothes. I reluctantly got out to test them. It’s important for me to make sure I don’t react to new items but I really hate doing it. I always feel so bad when Brett has to go back into the store to try again!
Some of the clothes he bought were okay but unfortunately most of the pants were badly contaminated. So frustrating! Brett went back in the building to return them and we decided to try Walmart instead.
In our experience, the Target in town is pretty hit or miss in terms of contaminated products. Thankfully, I’ve usually done well with the stuff from Walmart.
So we went to Walmart for round two of clothes shopping. Thankfully, we had more luck there. He only had to take two things back. Yay! We did it!
It was about 10:30pm when we were finally on our way back to our campsite. The drive takes about an hour and we were both wiped out!
It will all be worth it to see my family though and be reunited with our dog. They’re such good sports to go along with all these crazy precautions too! But that’s just the way they are, always willing to sacrifice for us.
By the way, Brett and I made a beautiful PDF of my favorite resources for suffering souls. I created the content and he made it look fancy with his superduper graphic design skills. It’s available for free to my email subscribers. Click here to sign up and receive 5 Resources for the Suffering Soul.
