As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was infested with thousands upon thousands of mites. It eventually got so bad that tiny holes started appearing all over my body, with some sort of yellowish-white larvae substance in it. My clothes were equally infested, and made things exponentially worse for me when wearing them. Sleeping naked was actually the optimal way to keep the crawling down, although the nocturnal nature of mites will keep you up all night regardless. I found that the more synthetic the fabric, the less mites would infest it. I also found looser clothing to be a better option, anything I wore that was snug against my skin produced too much warmth and mites would scurry to those areas. I don’t think I wore a bra or panties for 6 full months.
Through much trial and error, we found that the best method for clearing mites from our clothing was simply soaking them in very hot water for 1-3 hours with 1/2 to 1 cup each of baking soda and salt (depending on load size). I cleared 95% of my clothes with this method. I even soaked pillows, shoes, anything that I could potentially keep from having to toss out. We found the most convenient method was to bring large 5 gallon buckets into the bathroom and fill them from the shower head. (It helps to turn the heating element up on your water heater to get the water as hot as possible.) After soaking we would just transfer our clothes to the washing machine and wash as usual, with Tide laundry detergent. (Persil is also highly recommended in my mite groups, as is borax, although I will add that borax completely destroyed our washing machine and we had to buy a new one. Even though we melted it prior to tossing some in with a load of laundry, the empty borax mixing jar residue would eventually build up and create what looked like a white, hard as steel cement-like substance around the sides of the jar and I’m assuming that must be what happened to our washer.)
I threw everything in the dryer on high heat afterwards for good measure, and made sure to seal all dryer lint in a plastic bag before throwing it away. All clean clothes must be stored in plastic bags afterwards to prevent re-infestation. You can actually purchase oversized slide Ziploc bags on Amazon, those were the most convenient for clothing storage. A plain ol’ garbage bag works just fine too, but I do recommend buying clear ones, as it can be a huge pain to try to search for the shirt you want in a black garbage bag. I also want to recommend melting your baking soda/salt combo in a big jar or measuring cup before tossing it onto your bucket of clothing, otherwise you may get strange discoloration stains on your fabric. Nothing I soaked got destroyed, although I will say that a couple of my favorite dresses shrunk a tad. I was so grateful that I didn’t have to toss out all my clothes, the few things I had to part with were overly fuzzy sweaters I just couldn’t seem to clear of mites, and a couple pairs of sleep pants that I had to get rid of…every time I wore them I felt crawling around the elastic waistband area. If this method is failing you, or you’re finding it to be ineffective, your water might not be hot enough (in which case you can heat up large pots of water on the stove to fill your bucket) or you may be dealing with another bodily issue. I have noticed in my mite groups that people dealing with symptoms that imply they may have Morgellons don’t have very much luck with the baking soda/salt protocol. For anyone who thinks they may be dealing with Morgellons my heart goes out to you! If you find a laundry protocol that works for Morgellons sufferers please let me know and I’ll add it to my blog.