A Day In The Life…

When I started this blog I fully intended to do regular posts about my day to day experiences living with E.I.
Well, I had good intentions, but not much follow-through. So anyway, at long last, here’s a little story about a day in the life of an E.I. person.

Last week was really rough for me. Every day I kept smelling some awful, chemical smell coming from the laundry room into the kitchen. My mom (bless her soul) moved anything and everything she could think of that might be causing the smell, but it persisted. It was causing me to have trouble breathing and just feel worse overall.
Finally my mom started looking around outside the laundry room to see if the smell was coming from something in the back yard. Right by the back door is a peace lily plant infested with grashoppers.
So yesterday she killed about 50 of them, then, being the smart mom that she is, she caught one alive in a jar so we could muscle test to see if I was allergic to it.
She brought it into the house and as soon as it was about 5 feet away from me, I just lost it!
You see, often when I have a severe allergic reaction it causes me to sob uncontrollably. I know it’s weird, but that’s what happens.
Before I even touched the jar with the grasshopper in it, my body completely freaked out! My mind knew it was just a grasshopper, but my body was screaming, “Run away!!!”
By God’s grace I was able to hold the jar, while crying at the top of my lungs, so mom could do the allergy treatment on me. It took three times through the treatment before I stopped crying and our muscle testing indicated my allergy had been cleared.
Now, I’ve been through a lot of strange experiences with this Environmental Illness, but I think that probably ranks in the top 5! It was so bizarre. Imagine being highly allergic to a grasshopper! Actually, my guess is that they have some kind of natural poisonous or toxic gas that they give off as their protection from predators. As soon as I have some energy I’m going to research it and see if my hunch is right. All I know is, none of the animals in our neighborhood will eat the things!
As far as the chemical smell, I still don’t know if it’s coming from the grasshoppers or something else, but it certainly did result in an interesting story. =)