[Jennifer] I’m Jennifer and my family is from Charleston, South Carolina. My husband is Bernard and I have two children: AJ and Lana. 

[AJ] I’m AJ, 14, going into high school. I play the trombone in my concert and jazz band and I play ultimate Frisbee on a club team. When I first got sick, felt like I was either just tired from the sun or maybe had a light cold or flu and it just got worse from there.

[Jennifer] When we went to see the doctor, the doctor did some blood tests and within 24 hours we received a phone call from the hospital saying that we needed to admit AJ immediately. It was really frightening being in the hospital. We didn’t know what it was. We knew he had a bloodstream infection, but we didn’t know what was causing it, and that was very overwhelming. By the time we found out that Salmonella was making him sick, he had already started to respond to the antibiotics and so we were very relieved. 

[AJ] I ended up missing several weeks of school, most of those being in a home, being real sick, and a few days in the hospital. 

[Jennifer] After AJ started to feel better, the health department called and asked us a lot of questions about what AJ had eaten prior to his illness. At that time, they were able to determine that this was related a larger outbreak of Salmonella. So they came out and took some chicken out of my freezer and found out that this particular chicken was connected to the larger outbreak. 

[AJ] Looking back on it, I am lucky that the antibiotics worked for me because staying in the hospital a long time is not something anyone wants to do. 

[Jennifer] I’m an advocate for food safety in the kitchen. I make sure to keep the countertops clean, I don’t wash the chicken so as to avoid splattering germs around the kitchen, and most importantly when I'm cooking meat I use a food thermometer to make sure that the meat is cooked thoroughly.