We are Alive!

It’s been a little while. No, we didn’t drown in the ocean. No, the gator in the pond next to the hotel didn’t snatch us out of the pool. No, Florida’s humidity has not made the state intolerable. The truth is that we were having a lot of good days. Mold avoidance was starting to feel like vacation and not a mad running around. It all changed four days ago.

Four days ago we did a typical exploring trip. We went and checked out a town in the middle of the countryside. It was made up of big woodsy lots with everything from RVs, to dumpy trailers, to comfortable little houses on them. We came to the conclusion that there were too many dumpy trailers and that town wasn’t worth exploring further. On we went, to a bigger town.

In the bigger town we checked a hotel first, we pretty quickly identified that the outside air was bad. Before we felt the air switch to bad, we had seen a Chili’s. We decided to go back and get a mid-afternoon snack. At the Chili’s, Laura and I could feel mold inside. Based on experience, we could tell what we felt wasn’t damaging symptoms. I used to have headaches like that one when I was younger and this experience led me to wonder how many of those were mold triggered. We looked up and it looked really bad. This is an example of how mold isn’t as problematic in good air as it is when it is in bad air. This was a huge win that we could be in such a bad building and Laura not have a reaction.

After eating, we washed our faces to decon and went across the street to Walmart. We had no major reactions there, except by the water machine. By the water machine, Laura felt something that gave her the instinct to get out, so we filled the water and got out.

Up to this point, it had been a relatively normal day. Bad buildings and bad air are part of the game. You learn to navigate them in a way to minimize impact. As we left town, Laura had a breakthrough. While driving out of town, Laura had a little sensation and I had sense that there was MT there. Then it felt good and then Laura felt all kinds of symptoms for the next stretch of road. This was huge for her since she picked up a unique symptom for MT. Up till now all she had been able to figure out was the she would get a headache in MT and I would be confused/overwhelmed. This is a critical breakthrough because the people who have done mold avoidance longer than us have found that MT drives all the other sensitivities. Being able to identify it is critical.

Excited by this new discovery, we went up to Jacksonville the next day to walk through a known MT area. It was fun at first. Laura confirmed her sensation, and I learned a new one for me. Then we had to get out. All kinds hits from the drive up had been building up. Driving through southern Jacksonville hurt a lot. We escaped at last and made it back to our hotel.

I spent the next two days dealing with periods of low motivation, depressed thoughts, and general frustration. The first day, Laura felt good all day. The second day, our room was really bad. Laura woke up angry, but the hot tub took care of that. We spent these two days staying close to the hotel. On the third day, we felt like venturing out again.

We explored a neighborhood we had explored before all the adventures I just related. We felt better in the neighborhood than the first time we explored it. With what we had learned, we were able to pick up MT points we had missed. I reached a point where I told Laura I needed to be done exploring. Clearly, I was not fully recovered from Jax.

We went back to the hotel and joined our community group for the evening. Last night we were in a new room. We had thought it was fine but we didn’t sleep most of the night. We move rooms today back to a room we did really well in. Storms are rolling in and that typically makes the toxins worse.

For now, our plan is to hunker down, let the storms come, and cook the toxins out in the hot tub.