Allergic to everything including... her husband

Science Jeanette Walsh
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Johanna Watkins, a young 29-year-old US woman is living horrific moments.

She suffers from an extremely rare disease that makes her allergic to hundreds of things, including her husband.

It’s been a whole year since she started living isolated in a specially designed room by her husband. Every time she comes out, basically, her body is ‘bombed’ by all sorts of allergies. The windows are sealed and the whole room is covered in plastic. There is no natural sunlight and purifiers are omnipresent.

Johanna is allergic to foods, chemicals, sunlight, dust and hundreds of other factors. Also, she is allergic to smells, including the odor of her husband.

Her husband is desperate and feels incapable. He told local media that he cannot even embrace her without hurting her: ‘I cannot get too close to her. It’s not even safe to hug her. It’s very painful’.

Johanna met her husband, named Scott, five years ago, at Hope Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where they were both teachers. They married in 2013 and started to plan their future together, wishing to become parents.

But after only two years of marriage, her problems with allergies worsened considerably. At first, she thought it was just about food allergy and changed her daily diet, but this has not helped at all.

She was diagnosed with systemic mastocytosis syndrome, a rare disease where the body develops dangerous anaphylactic reactions to almost anything.

While she lives in the upstairs room, her husband is forced to sit in a room on the ground floor of their house. The only moments when Johanna leaves her room are when she needs to go to the doctor. Wearing a face mask, Scott quickly drives to the hospital.

‘As soon as the door opens, I can feel how my body is attacked. I feel like my body is waging a war with itself. My throat is dried. I feel like Darth Vader’, said Johanna.

Johanna’s body did not react to any treatment or chemotherapy, and her symptoms began to worsen. She can only eat about 15 foods.