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Don’t throw out the shoes- wear them and sit with the discomfort of wearing them, knowing that your shoes are doing their job.

I can relate- what you described is what I do with food. I have thrown out and not eaten food because I wasn’t sure it was contaminated. I am in therapy and I force myself to eat the food that I’m questioning. Obviously I’m not eating food that’s bad or expired- just like you aren’t wearing blood soaked shoes. I was afraid to eat bread, drink water, etc. my worst was I went to a friends restaurant and she gave me a sushi roll and I had to eat it to not be rude, and I surprisingly ate it.

I have contamination ocd as well. You can do this!!!!! You are doing great!

I can totally relate to you with the contamination aspect. I have contamination OCD to but mine is with Siemen. I've experienced thoughts about things I order online have somehow come into contact with it even though I'm 99.99 sure it hasn't. But OCD just needs a tiny shred of doubt and our minds run wild. Keep up the ERP! I am doing the same in my therapy now with my therapist. It really tough, but it would be much harder to continue to live the life of never ending compulsions.

This fear was a big one for me - I mean it still is scary. And the bloody tissue which I walked near but I’m pretty sure not on, literally happened a couple of weeks ago for me. It really freaked me out but what helped was having spoken to a sexual health expert that these things can’t survive for even like a few minutes outside the body. Another thing was doing a percentage approach. How many people unfortunately have these blood diseases, what is the chance it is still viable, what is the chance it ended up on my shoe, what is the chance it was blood, what is the chance it somehow got into me. When you multiple all those percentages together, you’ll get something like 0.00001% I know that doesn’t always help with OCD as it all comes down to struggling with even the tiniest bit of uncertainty, but hopefully it might help a little. It especially helps me when I convert the end percent into the likelihood of someone being able to correctly guess the exact date you’re thinking of over a certain period. For example, if you estimated that something was 0.0025% likely, the chance is 1 in 40,000. Divide 40,000 by 365 (how many days there are in a year) and you get 109. That therefore means, the risk you’ve calculated is equivalent to you picking a random date in your head over a 10 year period (i.e. 28th December 2057) and someone else guessing it right, the first time! Hope some of this maybe helps and that you keep on getting stronger