After that fateful day of the tornado, I did the one thing that NO ONE ever warns anyone about, especially if you are an asthmatic or allergy sufferer. DO NOT GO OUTSIDE (if at all possible) a few days after a tornado, 3 days is safest to be exact. By this time, you probably have realized, that I don’t listen to many safeguarded warnings anyway, so it would have been lost on me. We had gone outside to review the damages from the tornado. That was a BAD idea to say the least.

I ended up with a severe lung infection right after that. I suffered for months, and we were at a weird point in life, where that was the approaching transition of our healthcare system, and we didn’t have healthcare at that point. I literally was suffering some severe sinus/lung infection from the exposure to all the contaminates that were floating around in the air. Now that we are post-pandemic, my realization that I shouldn’t have ever walked out into that air without an N95 at least to filter some of the contamination would have been smart; but no one was thinking about that at the moment. In fact, even with the most recent tragic events of chemical spills, and fires from industrial warehouses, I’m certain there’s still others out there that don’t consider of safeguarding themselves from the exposures with a mask. (We now despise the thought of those things being on our faces again.) My experience is, they should be in your emergency kits for every purpose from now on, especially if you are a fellow “Mast-er” (Mast Cell Activation Sufferer).

When I’m referring to contamination, I’m literally saying anything from mold spores on the ground, to random chemicals in neighboring properties mixed with rusts, and various shreds of building materials are now floating particulates waiting to be inhaled. My lungs CONSUMED it all. This in turn, gave me this crazy infection, and then I start breaking out in hives. Weird rashes would pop up when cold and heat hit my skin, when I took a shower, the water hurt my skin similar to a full body tattoo. I recall looking at my husband one morning and asking him, “Why does the water hurt my skin?” When leaving the house, I had to have every inch of my skin covered, in fear that more welts would appear out of nowhere, I was living a literal nightmare. My go to meds were my albuterol inhalers and it took me a month or so before I broke down and drug my husband and I to an urgent care clinic to get antibiotics. He was sick too, but not the sick that I was, his was a minor sinus infection, congestion.

It was important to share that with you, because not only was I under a “Stress response” type situation, unbeknownst to myself, my mast cell activation syndrome became ACTIVATED.