Erica: Multiple Chemical Sensitivity


My name is Erica. I came here with severe MCS and severe food allergies and a little bit of OCD that I didn’t realize was there. I have had the MCS for I would say the last five years, and I’ve had the severe food sensitivity since I was born. And the OCD tendencies, I think that’s been a more recent thing maybe within the last year as the MCS progressed. With MCS. I think that basically started when I was little and just because I was raised in a moldy household and in the moldy household, they always buried a lot of pesticides ’cause there were a lot of bugs. And so, that just went on and on and on. And then when I went to middle school and high school, well it was filled, filled with mold too. And so, there’s mold and pesticides everywhere.

But in my high school in Alabama, you had to look good and you had to smell good too. So everybody wore a lot of perfume and everything, including me. ’cause I didn’t know. And so then I went to college and I was a music major and the music building was full of mold. You know, the nail in the coffin, the hump on the camel’s back was when I went and had my daughter, I knew all about all this. I knew about my reaction to medications. I knew about my mold. I knew about all of this stuff. And, after 26 hours of labor, they decided I needed to have a cesarean. And they use wrong medicine. My daughter, Zoe, who’s three also has MCS living life before I came here. It was existing. I was always really nervous about my neighbors because we had new neighbors that moved in and they really like Gain.

And, even though my house was sealed, it still seeps in. I went nowhere. My daughter went nowhere. The last time we went somewhere was September, 2012. At the beginning of September, we went to our safe organic farm because they let us come out once a week. My husband did all of the errands outside of the house. He’d come home and he’d change clothes in the garage and he’d put on his safe robe and he’d run upstairs without making contact with us. And he would shower and then he’d come back downstairs and if he wasn’t safe, he had to go shower again. And we had five air cleaners running at all times. The big Austins running at all times. All of the windows are sealed. If there’s a fire, I would have to like break the glass to get out because that’s the only way we can get out.

And we just lived in a bubble. I lived in a bubble of fear. I heard about DNRS a year and a half ago because somebody’s like, my friend told me about this thing that you could do. This is how she talks and it’s a video and you should order it. And I’m like, a video is not going to help me stop telling me all this stuff because it’s not gonna help. And I just pushed it to the back of my mind and just said whatever. And then I heard about someone in Dallas who could help me. And a friend of mine decided to go to that, someone in Dallas. And after she’s not getting that much better. Okay. So I decided not to go to him. But by then it had been a another year and a half of deterioration. And so I was up for like 48 hours one day I couldn’t sleep.

I was sitting at my computer sobbing . I’m like, please just show me something. So, then I go to YouTube and I watch videos of babies laughing to try to make myself happier. That didn’t work. It didn’t work that time.  I was just so far lost in despair. I was losing my ability to crawl my way out of it. And, um, pops up Annie’s thing. .. I’ve heard of this before. So I started looking at it and I’m looking at the testimonials and I’m like, I don’t have anything else to lose. I’m just gonna do it. I happen by it by chance because I’ve searched all kinds of stuff and I’ve never seen it pop up in a search. And it just, I swear was just like the divinity of God that night.

Just like, here it is. The first shift that I noticed was I had to let my cocker spaniel go outside to use the restroom. And I would always grab the front door and hold my breath and open it and threw it outside and close it. And I did that. And a whiff of Gain laundry detergent hit me. And it was like, I’m okay. It smells like Gain. I know my neighbor’s doing laundry, but I’m okay. And I left the front door open. That was huge. That to me signified that something was happening. Something was going right. And that’s also when I finally decided, yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and go to the in-person thing. And it was a really good idea to come to the in person because I’ve learned so much more in five days than I did for 10 months with the DVD.

Being at the program was seriously like magic. The first day I came here, I was barely able to function. I was, it was good that I got to the room, but I was basically in so thick of a fog. I could barely hear Annie and Candy speaking. But from being here and from filling in those holes or the gaps that I had that I didn’t get with the DVDs, I can’t even describe it because I’m so different. I have energy again. And not just energy. I’m like old Erica energy and I can move my hands and talk with hands. And I have a bounce in my step. And even I see the twinkle in my own eyes, you know, I just, I feel liberated. That’s the word. I feel liberated and I feel empowered. I feel like I can literally go wherever I want and I am gonna go wherever I want.

Because where I want to go right now is shopping. I wanna replace all of the clothes that I was told to give away and all of the shoes and all of the… I’m gonna look good. Let’s just say that. Yeah. I feel liberated and empowered. And my daughter, some of her outward physical symptoms, sometimes when she’s reacting, especially to chemicals, is, allergic shiners, but not like your typical allergic shiners that people talk about. My daughter looks like she’s been socked in the eyes and her eyes are puffy and they’re just, they’re just black. And you know, she’s a color of mocha, so it’s just, it’s really striking. And you get used to her looking like that because she’s looked like that since she was three months old. And I just, I look at her and say, you’re beautiful. But inside I’m just sobbing because I can’t get them to go away. And so we’re here at the conference and it’s like day two and a half, day three. And I look over at her and she’s like, Hey mommy. And I’m like, look at me again…, smile at mommy. And I said, Kevin, come look at her. And he comes in and he’s like, what’s wrong? I said, look at her, look really closely at her. And so he looks at her and he is like, her eyes don’t seem as dark. I know. And it’s just like, oh my gosh. And It’s just, I felt like a weight was just kind of lifted off of me. And I picked her up and I’m squeezing her and I’m so happy. And  she’s three. So the only thing she says is, please put me down. I’m watching a video. But she doesn’t get it. You know, she doesn’t get what’s happened, but I get it. And it’s just, it, seriously, I keep saying it’s magic. It really felt like magic. It felt like someone had taken an, an eraser and just erased the darkness and erased the puffiness. It was, man, I’m telling you better than Christmas. I wanna say it was like midday two that I put the mask down in class. And then it was the beginning of day three that I decided, you know what? I’m not gonna wear the mask. And my masks, they weren’t fancy. I couldn’t wear the painter’s mask because I reacted to them.

So what I would do is sit at my sewing machine and I would make my own mask and I’d just put multiple layers of activated carbon fabric in there. So it was really hard to understand me, but it gave me a good barrier. But I stopped wearing it–day three. I just said, you know what, I’m not gonna wear the mask. I’m gonna do the practice. And it is day five. I don’t even know where the mask is. I would say to the skeptics that I was a skeptic too, and I waited a year and a half of being a skeptic and deteriorating and getting worse. And it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. When I know where I am now and where I could have been, you know, I say you should just go ahead and do it because really it’s five days of your time. Just do it and you will be amazed. Just give it your all and you will be amazed and do it because Annie can help you. Annie telling you she’s an angel. She can do this. Just trust her. Trust yourself. Be courageous. Step outside of your little box. ’cause I was in one too. And just do it. Just do it. You have to do it. You owe it to yourself.

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