Sunday, February 2, 2014

Gardening Pause

You may have noticed that this blog hasn't had much activity over the last few months.

A couple weeks after my last post, I got a little virus, not much of anything, but after that, I started getting sicker, and sicker, and was barely able to hold body and soul together there for a while.  I have since been diagnosed with a mast cell disorder, which can become worse after a virus - what happened to me, essentially.

This is a WEIRD disorder. Normally, a person with allergies has mast cells that trigger and cause the symptoms of an allergic reaction when an allergen gets into that person's body. A person with a mast cell disorder has mast cells that trigger to more than that. To crazy things more than that.

Right now, my mast cells trigger as though I'm having an allergic reaction when I take a hot shower, when I get too much friction against my skin, when I eat the wrong foods, smell the wrong smells, or even get too cold. They have also started reacting to the sunlight heating the clothing against my skin, so whenever I go outside, if it's a nice temperature out, my skin will start to react after a few minutes as my clothing heats up just a little. But I also react if it's too cold out, too.

As you can imagine, this has had a pretty huge impact on my ability to garden. :-(

I am sure I can find a way to do this, at least a little bit. But for the moment, I'm still trying to figure out how to just make it through the day normally, like how to avoid the heat from cooking so I won't trigger when I cook, or how to get warm before I get out of bed so the cold air won't trigger an allergic reaction as soon as I get up.

So this blog is currently on hiatus. I look forward to coming back to it, but unless I luck out, I imagine it's going to be a few months, and might even be not until next year, depending on how challenging this all turns out to be. Maybe I'll just go over old pictures of my garden and play with those for a while, instead. :-)

Hope you all have a wonderful year and enjoy every moment out in your gardens!!

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