Time is speeding up! Our home walkthrough is a week from today. When we walk around the house now, it seems to be 100% finished besides some paint touchups, a few exterior tweaks, and I believe they're waiting on a heater or gas thing to be installed. Then the following week will be our closing day, and we can start moving in. It does not feel real. The busiest season of the year is upon us.
In other news from this week, asthma stuff! I know this isn't relevant to most people's lives so feel free to scroll to pictures if asthma isn't, like, a thing you're curious about haha. When I was a young teenager, I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma. Fortunately, asthma didn't come up all that often for me over the next 15 years unless I had been doing intense sprinting, which I found pretty easy to stay away from. I had an inhaler, but only used it maybe a handful of times over the course of a decade.
Not long after having baby Jack I started waking up gasping for air and coughing in the middle of the night. It happened more often over the next few years, but I didn't know it was asthma for a long time. I had seen my mom have occasional cough attacks like this, and in college sometimes I'd have a cough attack in big lecture halls too (spoiler alert: dusty lecture halls). For some reason I never connected the coughing with asthma and would tell Jared I just had a "small diaphragm" lol. Because this was happening more frequently after I had Jack, I really just believed this was a weird change my body naturally went through after being pregnant.
When we moved to Utah the nighttime cough stopped for a full month, until Jared and Savvy and all our belongings moved back in with us at our rental house. I was able to deduce that I was probably having a reaction to either our bed/bedding, or maybe our dog. Pretty soon after this we were couch shopping and found ourselves in the corner of a furniture store next to dozens of dusty fabric samples. The asthma immediately flared up as I thumbed through the fabric samples, in an extreme way that had me kind of scared. This was an aha moment for me that perhaps dust was the trigger. I researched and read that you have to wash your sheets in hot water to kill off the dust mites. I began washing our linen sheets weekly in hot water instead of monthly in cold water, and this definitely reduced the nighttime cough attacks.
Fast forward to this spring/summer/fall. I was still having the nighttime cough (though less often since switching to hot water for our sheets), and I would wake up in the morning with awful allergies. I have seasonal allergies, so this wasn't a surprise, but when autumn came and allergy season was over, I was still having intense allergies every morning. At this point I knew I must be allergic to something in our house—probably our dog or our mattress. I sealed up our mattress in a hypoallergenic zip-cover and later did the same for my pillow. Ding! That did the trick, and for the first time in YEARS, I haven't had asthma/allergy issues at all since. Absolutely wild how easy that solution was and how long it took me to pinpoint the issue. I researched memory foam allergies and learned that my issue isn't with memory foam itself, but with the way it holds onto dust/dust mites. Now I can trace my allergy-induced asthma issues back not to being pregnant, but to buying our memory foam mattress a few months after Jack was born. I am shook that I didn't realize how closely allergies and asthma are related til this year. I for sure should have seen a doctor about these things years ago, but I had very intense pregnancy/newborn years with our kids and there were bigger fish to fry.
So anyway, that's a very long story that probably won't help anyone else in their own life, unless you happen to have an undiagnosed dust mite allergy and a mysterious nighttime cough. It feels hopeful to be figuring out how all my health puzzle pieces fit together. I have an appointment with an asthma/allergist next month to test if I have issues with any other household allergens, and to find out what seasonal allergens are giving me issues so we don't plant a grass I'm allergic to at our next house. And then we will dump our memory foam mattress and get something more hypoallergenic going into our next house as well.
Ok, I'm done boring the people with my allergy/asthma epic. Onto pictures from our week! My brother's family came to visit from Idaho and we had the best weekend.
