As of October 2024, my (Brenda) health took a major turn. Nothing we could have predicted. My healing from Lyme+ took an abrupt halt when I realized my thyroid meds were making me unable to eat because of severe nausea. I had struggled with this for years but had never made the connection until I started looking at the timing of when I would get sick. My thyroid medicine was pork based. After replacing my thyroid meds with synthetic I instantly noticed the nausea was gone. I had been bitten by yet another tick and had contracted Alpha Gal sometime in the last 6 years. All mammal products needed to be cut out.

This turned my world upside down.

What I didn’t realize is how this would affect our farm. As winter continued, I also developed MCAS a month later. Between the two I ended up home bound, reacting to even the slightest smell of mammal products. I became fume reactive to pork. Our household went from cooking home grown bacon every single weekend to me being trapped in my bedroom struggling to breath for hours if it was cooked in the house. We continued to care for our goats only to realize I started reacting severely to them. I struggled to be able to breath after going in the barn if they had even slightly dirty bedding. I fought months of anaphylaxis reactions only to realize I would not be able to keep the goats after Kori graduated high school. I could not even pet them anymore let alone be able to milk them or clean their pens. As much as this broke our hearts, we had to make the decision that was best for my health. That meant selling all of our goats. We will not be able to raise pigs any longer either, but they had already been processed.

Our lil farm got a lot smaller really quickly as we sold all of our does and their babies. Our bucks have slowly been sold too. We worked so hard to become self-sufficient. I was living the dream! We raised our own pork, chicken, hunted for our venison, caught our own fish and bought pasture raised beef from a local farmer. We drank the milk our goats gave us, and I was making yogurt every week while experimenting with making cheese, cajeta, ice cream and other goat milk-based products. Our story change!