For those who have been asking us what’s going on, for others that don’t know all the details, or for anyone who happens upon this, this is the history of where all our mold drama started. I’ve been wanting to write about this for awhile. Partly for my own records, partly because it’s therapeutic to write, and then also for those who are interested in knowing more about our situation. At the risk of sounding like one of “the crazies”, I also want to share this to help inform people of the dangers of toxic mold. We are definitely in the learning stages of things, but I want to share all that we have learned along the way in hopes that this may benefit others in some small way. So…here we go….From the very beginning….Be warned, this will probably be long-winded…..
Last July, some 16 months ago, we had just returned from a family trip to DC. I was 7 weeks pregnant, and feeling every bit of that. In addition to “morning ” sickness, I had been experiencing a fluttery feeling in my chest, around my heart for a few weeks, but assumed it was some weird pregnancy symptom I had never experienced before. This was our fourth baby, and I thought I had the whole pregnancy thing down, but this one was different. Our stay in DC was tons of fun, but pretty stressful. First off, being in the first trimester is difficult, then you add to that, daily walking all over the city with temperatures over 100, and most likely not drinking nearly enough water, especially for a preggo (I see you shaking your head in disappointment, mom). I was unknowingly pushing myself too hard, weakening my body and immune system. Then of course, when we travel we eat like savages, so I know I ate horrid amounts of junk on our trip, further pushing my body over the edge. I was about to reenter a toxic environment, and was ill prepared.
The night we got home I was feeling even more flutterings in my chest, but after researching this for awhile and feeling pretty confident that I wasn’t having a heart attack
, we headed to bed to get some much needed rest after a day of travel. I woke an hour later, completely disoriented, I could not figure out where I was. I felt dizzy, even though I was lying down (try explaining that to a DR), and my heart was racing and pounding away. I was terrified, so I woke Richard. The dizziness continued, so I called my midwife to let her know what was going on. She sent me to the ER. They ran tests, monitored me, but couldn’t see anything abnormal with my heart. We waited….and waited…while they monitored. Then finally my heart took off, with me sitting still, it went from in the 70′s to 150′s bpm. The DR was impressed at this point, so I was admitted to the hospital for further observation. Richard and I spent the next several hours trying to get comfortable on one of those beds that are designed for elderly people. You know the ones that move every 10 seconds to keep you from getting bed sores??? Anyway, they ran more tests and asked more questions and after many more hours we were nowhere closer to figuring out what was going on. One of the many Dr’s I saw said I probably had just overdone it in DC (she was right at some level), and I needed to rest and take B vitamins. Hmmmm….really? That’s all??? Knowing what I know now, I find it interesting that none of these doctors asked about the air quality of our home. Do people not realize how vital clean air is for our health??? I sure didn’t back then…. For some reason that issue is passed over in the medical field….
Moving on, this day was the beginning of some of the most difficult weeks of my life. For the next 9 weeks or so, life was hell. My symptoms got worse. I was feeling crazy and completely unstable. I felt this horrible dizzy/foggy/anxious feeling all through the day, and the nights were worse. I was exhausted, but when I laid down to sleep, I started having muscle spasms and panic attack like symptoms. The moment I would begin to drift off to sleep I would jolt awake with the feeling you have when you’re falling. This would go on for hours, making sleep impossible. Every night went this way, and it just kept getting worse. For those nine weeks I averaged 2 hours of sleep each night, and that sleep was fitful. For those of you who have been pregnant, you know how necessary sleep is for our sanity. Every muscle in my body was incredibly tense, I started having unrelenting migraines, and so many other weird symptoms. Richard at this point started going into work at 2 am, so he could be home in time to care for the kids when they woke, so I could finally get some sleep. Talk about “for better or for worse”…. Of course, this wasn’t best for his health, but being the sweetheart that he is, he carried on, uncomplaining….Also, my brother Matt moved in with us to help care for me. It was an incredible comfort to have another adult in the house. He would stay up till all hours of the night with me, watching old black and white movies, listening to me ramble on.
We saw more doctors (I think we saw around 10 total), and none of them had answers. Finally I was sent to a neurologist because my symptoms seemed to be nerves or brain related. Yikes. I was sure I must have a brain tumor or something. The neurologist wanted me to have an MRI to rule out MS and other possibilities. The results came back fine…Praise God, but still we were nowhere closer to finding out what was wrong….and still no one asked about air quality. I finally found some relief when I started seeing a family friend that is a physical therapist. She did wonders for my muscle tension and made my headaches tolerable, but I still wasn’t doing so well. We all were just assuming that this must just be a pregnancy from…well….you know. The most common “suggestion” for the cause of all this I heard from doctors or my midwives was “It sounds like panic attacks”. It did, but having dealt with fear/anxiety my whole life, I knew this was different. I do believe that my fears over the situation were making things worse though. Months went by, I had another “episode” with my heart in November and was once again sent to the ER. We spent two nights in the hospital this time, they ran more tests, took more blood. They did a CT of my lungs to check for blood clots. That was a nightmare. I have so much sympathy now for anyone who has to go through radiation treatment. Not fun.
I could go on and on. Our lives were upside down, but in the middle of all this, when I faced the most intense fears of my life, I had to make a decision….I could trust the Lord with all of this, or give in to the terrors that were trying to take hold. I camped out in the Psalms for months, borrowing Tedd Tripps reading plan for the Psalms (5 a day all through the month). This not only brought sanity to our chaos, but a sweet peace too….that is, when I would fight my fears and put my hope in Christ. One of the worst and most debilitating symptoms at this point (and even now) was this wretched fog I was in. It’s so difficult to describe, but everything was surreal, dream-like. Nothing felt real. I couldn’t distinguish between reality and dreams. I had the most horrifying dream one night and wept for days because it was so real. I couldn’t wake up from it. Everything in my peripheral was darkening, like I was falling down some sort of hole. Yeah, like I said, difficult to describe. I could deal with the chronic fatigue, pain, headaches, crazy symptoms at night, etc…but feeling like I was disappearing, and everything and everyone around me foggy and unclear, that was too much. I couldn’t care for my family, I couldn’t focus on my kids when they would try and talk to me….blah…. BUT…things were “manageable” (this is what we told ourselves). We were all together and well….sort of. There was much to be thankful for! Namely, the little one who was growing inside of me. It still amazes me when I think about all that little guy went through inside of me. I’m so grateful that he is here and so healthy and even seems advanced for his age (I know, I know….all mom’s think their babies are smart ).
Anyway…..I think you’re getting the picture, so I’ll try and wrap this up. We were hopeful that when Si was born, things would get easier….they didn’t, in some ways things got worse. Maybe it wasn’t the pregnancy afterall. So, what was going on??? We had been down every road, so we thought. We had looked into every possibility. Pretty much every part of my body had been checked over, from head to toe, so what was the deal???
In the middle of all this, we were also finishing the house we had started building a few years before. We were finally going to be able to buy it!!! Somewhere in this time period my cousin Kriss mentioned that she knew of a family that had been having a huge crisis with mold. Mold??? We looked into it a little, because we knew there was mold in the ancient house we were renting, but it didn’t quite make sense. At that point, I thought of mold as being more sinus/breathing symptoms only. I had those, but if it were mold, surely symptoms would go away when I was out of that toxic environment. Right??? Wrong. Kriss told me the family, Chris and Andrea Fabry, had a blog (linked below) and I needed to check it out. I put that off for a couple months. That was a mistake….
When we moved into our new house, things got better for me. There was a noticeable difference in my health. Then I had a follow up appointment with my cardiologist. I had consistently had an irregular EKG through all of this, so he wanted to see if it had gotten better after Silas was born. It hadn’t. He ordered a stress test. I failed that, so he ordered another sort of stress test. He wanted to pump some sort of radioactive junk in my blood, but I declined, seeing as I couldn’t touch any humans or nurse my baby for 5 DAYS!!!! I went with the stress echo instead. Finally!!! some good news!!! This doctor said my heart looked healthy and fine. (They had actually mentioned valve blockage as a possibility!!! ) Phew.
So…we looked into the mold thing again and it was making more and more sense. But….after many months of living in our new house, we were still sick. I was still weak, foggy, and had sinus issues. The kids had dark circles under their eyes. We ordered an ERMI test, and the results showed high levels of various kinds of mold. We had cross-contaminated our lovely new house by bringing all of our furniture and clothes with us from the old one. If only we had known about the issue of cross-contamination , we could have saved ourselves a LOT of trouble, and money, and stress, and….carpet. Anyway, we all know what they say about hindsight. Moving on.
So where are we now in all of this? Mold remediation. Essentially cleaning everything in the house from top to bottom. We had to ditch around 75% of our things, but we noticed a big difference in our health when we did that. Another sign that we were FINALLY moving in the right direction. We finally have an answer! It has been confirmed again and again in other ways. It’s so much easier to fight now that we know what we’re up against!
In closing, I wanted to share a list of symptoms that are common for mold toxicity….just in case someone happens upon this, and you have crazy symptoms that your doctor can’t figure out.
- Body aches (joints, muscle, and sinus)
- Headaches
- Allergies
- Allergic reactions to foods
- Anxiety
- Appetite swings
- Bleeding ear
- Bleeding gums
- Body temperature regulation problems
- Shortness of breath
- Bronchitis
- Charley horses
- Chills
- High cholesterol
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Abnormal circulation
- Cognitive problems – difficulty assimilating new information; difficulty finding words; difficulty focusing; difficulty thinking or accomplishing other executive functions such as organizing and planning; difficulty with math or handling numbers; difficulty with short-term memory; short-term memory loss
- Constipation
- Coughing
- Abdominal cramping
- Delayed recovery from normal activity
- Depression
- Diarrhea
- Dizziness
- Endometriosis
- Burning, red, or watery eyes
- Fatigue
- Fever
- Fibromyalgia
- Leaky Gut
- Hypoperfusion (decreased blood flow through an organ)
- Inflammation
- Insomnia
- Insulin resistance
- Interstitial Cystitis
- Irritable Bowel Syndrome
- Laryngitis
- Light sensitivity
- Lyme Disease
- Metallic taste in mouth
- Migraines
- Mood swings
- Morning stiffness
- Muscle cramps, jerks, or twitches
- Nausea
- Numbness in the arms, legs, feet, or hands
- Pain – abdominal, arm, back, chest, chronic, cycles, feet, growing, hip, joints, leg, lungs, mistaking cold and hot, sinus, stabbing, vulvar
- Rashes
- Raynaud’s Phenomenon
- Respiratory problems
- Rosacea
- Seizures
- Sensitivity to bright light
- Static shocks
- Sinus congestion
- Sinus infection
- Skin sensitivity
- Sleep apnea
- Sleep disturbance
- Stiffness
- Sweating
- Swelling
- Sore throat
- Tingling
- Burning tongue
- Tremors
- Frequent urination
- Vertigo
- Blurred vision
- Weakness
- Weight gain
- Weight loss
- Wheezing
In addition to this, some of my hair fell out (I can see lots of new growth on my head now), my arms were bald!
(I borrowed this list from Andrea’s site, I recommend looking into this if you are on a similar journey, or just looking for some tips on healthy living)
Anyway, if you made it through my ramblings, thanks!!! I warned you it would be long! I hesitated to do this post because it’s so self-focused, but, thankfully, I took the brunt of our mold exposure, so that unfortunately means writing about myself. As far as the kids and Richard go, their symptoms consisted of suppressed immune systems, rashes, hair loss (I have noticed new growth on Elliotte too), heart palpitations (occasional with Gideon and Eden), new allergies, etc…Thankfully nothing too scary!
Again, thanks for reading!