Hey 61901,

Since my odor gets bad during flight when I eat onboard, I get very self-conscious of my breath and tend to brush my teeth at least twice in the lavatory using the bottle water the flight attendants give out.  I always carry a toothbrush and paste with me in my purse.  I avoid talking to people as a result in the plane, so normally, I don't get strong reactions.

However, when our older son, who has the strong odor condition used to travel with us on family vacations as a teenager, he just usually would not speak much either.  I think he just acquired an 'I don't give a sh__" attitude, and ignored people around him, and he would go ahead travel anyway as opposed to giving up going on the trip. 

In fact, now that you mentioned it, he always said that he felt a great deal of anxiety about flying, but he said the anxiety stemmed from being above ground.  He wouldn't let that hold him back, as he always tried to face his fears head on.  I wonder, now that we are discussing this, if his fear and anxiety was odor related at some level, and he just thought it was fear of being off the ground.  Now that his odor is under control, he is not afraid of flying, and he went to Amsterdam by himself to meet some friends, and was planning on going to California from Miami as well.  Perhaps there was some subconscious underlying odor-related anxiety there, who knows.

All I can suggest to you is to acquire the 'I don't give a sh__' attitude when the odor and the situation is out of your hands, and go and enjoy seeing the world. 

Have you been trying any odor-management protocol to help you control your odor? 

María

Oh OK, then, this is my story of the process of self-awareness as I began to look for answers to my son's condition.  This is what I wrote in the Comment section of my blog.

I can see where it may sound confusing, as it’s been an emotional roller coaster ride for me too as a result. In my teens through the age of 17, I had horrible breath, with extremely swollen tonsils and very large, horribly smelly tonsil stones, which I have discussed in the forums. After they removed my tonsils right before my 18th birthday, the bad breath still lingered, but not as intense. It was in my mid 30s, after giving birth to my 1st son that my breath got better (hormonal changes), but by then I had developed and extreme case of OCD brushing my teeth about 8 times a day. My dentist would tell me to stop brushing so much because I was wearing out my tooth enamel, but I couldn’t help it. I also obsessively chewed gum all the time since my adolescence, and even though I’ve recently read in the forums that it really only produces worse BB, but I just can’t stop chewing gum, it is an obsessive compulsion.

Also, my husband is the one who has always commented to me when my breath gets bad. He says that he always knew when I was about to get my period because of my breath, the odor of the oil on my oily skin on my face and scalp and sometimes my neck, and vaginal odor. Since I’ve been with him for 28 years, it really didn’t bother me that much because I knew he loved me and the odor wasn’t getting between us.

Also, my odor never really affected me in the workplace. I would just never speak to people in close proximity. My husband also helped me be OK with it by telling me that his high school girlfriend was the same with her odor levels related to her monthly cycle. It worked, I guess, by me believing that this was normal with all women.

Then, when my son developed his extreme odor, I never thought to associate his intense odor with something he could have inherited from me because the type and intensity of the odor was different. But when my younger son began to have odor around the age of 15-16, then I slowly but surely began to put the pieces together.

I posted somewhere in one of the forums, that I really believe now that I have had mild BO, especially prior to my complete hysterectomy a couple of years ago, my older son has terribly strong BO, and my younger son is somewhere in between. I also mentioned somewhere in the forums the varying amount of choline rich foods we (my sons and I) can each tolerate before the odor kicks in, and how long it takes each of us to manage to get rid of the odor with the proper protocol.

This is when my husband and I together arrived at the conclusion that there must be some genetic link here between me and both my sons. I guess this whole experience has helped me become more aware of my own symptoms, to face them as part of a possible genetic link, and put it all into perspective in relation to each of my sons and possible future generations. I would never have seen this in the past had my older son not developed his extreme odor.