she’s full of mold, folks

OK, so mold.

Let me back up.

I’ve been feeling increasingly unwell for quite some time now, 3 1/2 years if I had to track it backward. In the summer of 2022, I took the boys on a half cross-country road trip and a month later, I was at the library during our morning huddle, clutching onto the display shelf, about to pass out. As soon as the huddle ended, I rushed into the bathroom, dropped my phone in the toilet, then downed a bottle of water. I passed a kidney stone, I later learned. I had kidney stones and gall stones but I must have passed them on my own because by the time a urologist could finally work me in for an appointment, he looked at my imaging results and said, why are you here? like I was wasting his time.

So yeah, I’ve just been bumbling along becoming more and more fatigued, dealing with new symptoms cropping up and disappearing, seeing different doctors who looked at me like I was imagining things. I got blood tests and urine tests, always with abnormalities, but never anything a doctor thought was too big of a deal or worth anything other than a quick new prescription. Also happening, I broke up with the man who had gone on the road trip with me, moved out of our shared house, into a duplex as housing prices surged. I bought the house without a co-signor which felt like a giant feat, thankful for my promotion at work that allowed me to be a homebuyer.

Fast forward to now having a supportive partner who is concerned about my declining health, and wants to get me the help I need. He has watched my hikes get increasingly hard on me: from four hours getting lost in the forest with an audiobook on my own to needing him to ox me up a hill. He researched and found me a perfect therapist, and in one of those therapy sessions, she recommended to me a doctor who actually listens to women rather than treating them like they’re hysterical.

That appointment was unlike any other interaction I’ve had with a medical professional. My doctor listened to me completely, asked me questions that no one else had. Have you had any exposure to mold that you know of? she asked. Funny you should ask, I replied. I had just taken on $10K in new debt to replace my duplex’s air conditioner, the home’s original model which not only shut down completely, but also, it turns out, was full of mold. Aarik had paid to have our air ducts vacuumed out after we discovered that, wondering if that had contributed to me and my kids getting sick. My new doctor, who herself suffered from mold toxicity and was ignored by doctors until she found someone in Chicago who specialized in it, ordered a test to see if her suspicions were correct.

When my blood test results came back, the molds in my body lit up like a Christmas tree, as people used to say. So now I’m on an antifungal medication, something I never knew existed. Now I’ve had a guy come out to my house and measure the molds present in the air. Although the old air conditioner is gone and the ducts have been vacuumed out, we are not in the clear. He will return this week to see if he can ascertain the source of the mold, but it could be, he said, in the building materials themselves. Living in the walls, under the floors. If that’s the case, yes, I suspect we’ll have to move. The first step toward recovering from exposure to toxic mold is removing yourself from the mold environment, after all.

If this sounds crazy, because mold is everywhere, even outside, I hear you. It sounds crazy to me too. But the reason my doctor knew to look into it was because I disclosed to her my gene mutation. I was tested for it after my mother told me her and her siblings carried it. All sorts of people are exposed to mold and sometimes it has little to no negative effects on them. But when people with my gene mutation are exposed to mold, we can get very sick. One study I found said 90% of people who report mold toxicity also have the gene mutation.

This year I am hoping to read more books, finish writing a couple, take all my accrued time off work, and rid myself of mold. Let’s see how it goes.