The Floral Hustle

  📍 Hello, flower friends. This is Jen and you are listening to the floral hustle podcast on this week's mini. So we're going to talk about something interesting and something vulnerable, you know, me and vulnerability. I want to talk about how being a florist actually made me sick and I'm sharing this because I had another flower friend, um, in my local market that had posted that they're actually closing their business down after their current commitments.

Have dissipated and like that broke my heart, but also made me realize that like, what has happened in my story is happening to others. And I think a lot of people can't figure it out. And I, when I do something, I go all in on figuring it out and fixing it. And that is to me, I think one of my superpowers.

But it also was an expensive endeavor to do that as well. And I have enabled myself because of how my business is set up, how hard I work, how successful my business is to be able to have the resources to do things like that. So I'm going to explain what happened first. Uh, I had since my son been trying to lose weight.

And I lost like 50 pounds in my first year and then it kind of stopped and I wanted to lose another 25 pounds. I gained a lot of weight with my son, like I just, I was almost 40 having a baby and just thought Snickers ice cream bars were delicious and about every other bad thing for me. Uh, I wasn't working out cause I was just like working a lot and I was taking care of, um, I was working full time while I was pregnant with him.

Until my eighth month and I had a lot of things going on with my, um, my daughter's dad and him being mildly, he is a crazy person. So, I then, um, after a couple years of trying different things, so I hired a personal trainer. I... Like went and I was doing this at home personal training program with a, um, nutrition component that had a like we, I, you pay this and you, we guarantee you're going to lose the weight.

And I'm like, okay, sign me up. That sounds awesome. And plus I was just, I was feeling tired. I was feeling sluggish. I was feeling just like, not myself. And I knew like working out was part of that because I hadn't really dedicated. Like, here's my health and I need to really, you know, be the healthiest version.

I was taking care of my parent, my mother before that I was taking care of my dad. Before that I had never really prioritized my health. I had prioritized my job, my business, my daughter. And it all kind of came to a head because I was like, I really need to figure out why this is happening. And my sister who is a, uh, she is a cardiovascular nurse practitioner, but she has her doctorate in nursing teaching.

And so we were talking and I was just like, I just don't feel... And she had mentioned, because she, often symptomatically, she's gluten intolerant and a bunch of other things. And I just said, I just don't feel like, like myself. Like something feels off. And I'm, you know, tired. And then, of course, you come up with all the excuses.

Well, I'm a new, I'm, I have a kiddo that doesn't sleep. I have all these things I was coming up with. So then I decided to go to a functional medicine doctor after she had mentioned that. And I had never even heard of it nor knew any clue what it was. So I did some research and I saw all these people saying, like, my regular doctor, because I went into my regular doctor, had all the tests, had my thyroid checked, had You know, expansive blood work done and nothing.

So then I went to this functional medicine doctor and was explaining to her everything. And she was just like, are you exposed to chemicals on an ongoing basis? And I was like, well, what do you mean chemicals? And I said, probably I'm around flowers a lot. Uh, I grow flowers. I am around flowers all the time.

I do a lot of weddings. And so then with some digging, um, she was like, well, I really think that you should do this EnviroTest that, uh, it's an expensive test. I think it was over 800, but it is a comprehensive, um, environmental test that will show us if you have any chemicals in your body, what they are, what they're doing, what's going on and how we can kind of figure out a game plan from there.

And by this point, I was like, okay, just sign me up, you know, you spend an hour with her and that's 400 and you're you know, this test is this and then she's like and I also want you to go and get a little bit More comprehensive blood work done. I said, okay. I Very this is a funny story. So you have to for this environmental test you have to pee in a cup And you have to freeze it, and then you have to go to FedEx and overnight it to this Great Plains testing place.

And I said, okay. I couldn't figure out how the stupid envelope sealed, so I'm at FedEx going, I don't know how this medical envelope seals. And the lady like rips it from me and she's gonna like, you know, go and put, I was like, just to let you know my frozen pee is in there. And she's like. Okay, so then she gingerly starts like just sealing it shut.

So then I get the results. Um, I actually go and I meet with her and she's explaining everything to me. And you know, of course, there's a bar graph of like what normal pesticides in your body is, what normal herbicides in your body is, what normal mold, what normal yeast, what normal all these things. And I'm like all the way to the right.

For pesticides, for herbicides, for a gasoline chemical that I don't remember the name and it was really complicated, but it's found in flour foam. And then mold and yeast. Yeast could probably be a lot related, she thought, with my diet and what I was eating. But herbicides and pesticides, most likely I've been breathing that in for umpteen years and it has built up to a toxic level in my body.

And I was, I was shocked because I'm like, are you serious? And my studio is in my garage, which is a two and a half by two and a half car garage. It has a, you know, front door, back door has a garage door at the front of it. But we're mainly to keep it cool in here. We keep all everything kind of shut. Um.

And I have a actual furnace in here and it's got all the duct work, everything, but the person needs to change the filter. And that person would be me to help purify the air a little bit more consistently. But I found through the conversation that, well, 90% of that pesticides or whatever. I'm taking these flowers that are coming from everywhere that have high amounts of pesticides, and I'm breathing that in.

I thought it was me touching it, me touching all the flowers, and that I was going to have to start to learn to design with gloves on all the time. But she's like, the most of these things, when you're tearing leaves off, when you're doing everything, all those things, you're breathing them in. Then she was like, the mold, is there mold in your house?

And I'm like, God, I don't... I think there is. So I went and got some mold tests and pointed them around my house, but then I went and looked at my cooler. And my cooler had mold in it. It gets it periodically because it is a damp, moist place. Then, Um, the gasoline that's in flower foam, obviously I knew I'm exposed to flower foam because we are not a foam free, um, Studio.

And so all these things like with my health and this report just started making sense and I was like devastated. I'm like, what am I going to do? And so I started researching. I went and got like a filtration system that will circulate the air every 45 minutes in the studio. I, um, Went and I said, I need to re, you know, I can do all the things to implement going forward, but I need to detox my body.

So I bought a sauna blanket to detox, um, and sweat some of those things out. And I also started taking, um, it's called glutathione, I think it is. And not only was I starting to drink it, which it tastes horrible. I actually, like, signed up through their, they have an IV aggressive, um, therapy that, like, you go in every week and it gives you a higher dose and it actually connects to the particles of, um, the pesticides and the herbicides and the mold in your body and you flush it out of your system by peeing or pooping or whatever you're doing, um, to, you know, sweating.

All those things, when you're excreting things out of your body, it's helping connect with it to do it more. So then, I um, decided that I was gonna, you know, of course put some things in the studio to help around there. But I also decided I was going to get healthy because all those things were wearing my body down because I wasn't being healthy.

So I really decided from then, I was going to take my health seriously. I was going to... Um, start working out. I was going to start eating better and that's when I signed up for CrossFit and I started just doing all of these life changes to make myself the healthiest version of myself. I didn't give up. I knew that there were so many underlying reasons why this was happening.

Obviously, I'm heavily exposed. I was doing a ton of weddings. I'm, you know, all of these things just stacked up. The stress, the everything. And since then, things have started to get better, I've had my levels checked, and things, because of the flush, because of all the things I'm doing, all the chemicals have gotten so much better in my body, the levels that they were at, that things have progressed in a positive direction.

So, if you are not feeling good for some reason, and you are around flowers like I am, this could be something that is going on with you, but you don't know unless you get checked. My other flower friend, like, just is speculating after meeting with some type of doctor, but never had any concrete tests done.

There are concrete tests you can have done that will check your levels. Yes, they are expensive, but I don't think you can make educated decisions in your life unless you have the data. Speculating does not help anybody. And so I like concrete facts. I like to know if something is working or not working.

I wanted to know, and you can actually just have the part of the test, I had a comprehensive test done, but they do have afterwards to check your levels, you can get segments of that testing done. I went to a functional medicine doctor, which in the Twin Cities here, we're very lucky because we, I mean, there's, there was pages of Google Returns for them, but in a lot of areas that is not the case.

So sometimes you just have to do a little bit of research. A regular doctor, when I told my regular doctor about this, she looked at me like, huh? And was kind of miffed. But I knew that I had cracked the code and I had advocated for myself and I had figured out something that totally makes sense that it would have happened, even though it's sad that that's the place that we live in, that our flowers are so full of pesticides.

And chemical products that it got to this point, but that's the current reality. All we can control is how we react to it. And so putting that filtration system in here, making sure that I am trying to be healthy and doing things proactively to be the best version instead of being a victim to my circumstances is so helpful in, in this situation instead of just I could have just put my give up panties on and just said, I guess I can't be a florist anymore, but that's just not happening.

So, I hope this might have been insightful. If you have anything going on, go check yourself out. Like, go to a functional medicine doctor if you can have one. Go have one appointment. They can even do a test where they hold a little jar of that chemical up to your skin and your body... Physically reacts to it.

When they put the pesticide on my leg, she was holding, I was holding my arm up and she was saying, like, don't let me push your arm down and I completely lost strength when the chemicals that were in my body were happening because it's like my body was not in a good place and putting that more of that near me was causing my body to physically react.

And so they can do things like that too, just as a beginner. Um, To kind of help figure out some of the things, but I hope this was helpful. It's been a long journey, but I feel like this other example out there really just made me feel like I wanted to share about it. Um, and I hope, I hope if that's, if this is you, that you do something and you can take control of your life because we don't have to be victims.

We are the author, the creator of our story and we can rewrite the pages, so. 📍 Have a great day, flower friend.