The human body possesses a remarkable, if sometimes harrowing, ability to signal that something is fundamentally wrong long before the traditional symptoms of illness manifest. For Laura Gómez, a thirty-two-year-old mother whose life was defined by the energetic pace of raising her children and managing a career, that signal arrived not as a fever or a localized pain, but as a persistent, maddening itch. At its onset, the sensation was a mere nuisance—a fleeting irritation on her arms and torso that she easily dismissed as a byproduct of a new laundry detergent or perhaps a seasonal reaction to the changing weather. In the initial weeks, Laura navigated the world with the assumption that her body was simply overreacting to an external allergen, a common enough occurrence in a modern world filled with synthetic fragrances and processed foods.
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