South Portland woman allergic to nearly everything – 波蘭女差不多對所有東西都過敏

Goodwin says she has Mast Cell Activation Syndrome which makes her allergic to nearly everything. Contact with things like perfume, deodorant, grass, even sunlight can cause her to have a reaction, “I get hives and flushing all over my body, my body turns red and it feels like it’s on fire, it burns, and it itches.” She says the pain is almost unbearable, “I start to get abdominal pain, I have diarrhea, I have nausea, I feel light-headed and my lungs start to swell. It gets harder and harder to breathe.” Goodwin takes 38 pills per day to control these symptoms but even those don’t work sometimes.

For the most part she’s confined to her South Portland apartment, “there’s part of me that feels like if this is what the rest of my life is going to be like, stuck inside, it’s not worth living.” 

The one thing she says would bring some sense of normalcy to her life is a house. But building a house she can live in is going to take work. She says, “it will need to be a smaller house because obviously I can’t maintain a big house and then I’ll have to work with my doctor to see what kind of flooring I can have, and paint.”

Unfortunately her dream of building a home is temporarily on hold; Goodwin says the bills are piling up. Because of her condition she says she’s spending more than she’s bringing in from Social Security and Disability. She told CBS 13, “I have to decide sometimes whether I can eat or buy my medicine or pay rent.”

Goodwin says she’s not sure if there’s an end in sight but she’s not giving up, “I just have this drive, I’m not going to let this take me down.”

Source: http://www.wgme.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/south-portland-woman-allergic-nearly-everything-27150.shtml#.VVGLf46qqkp