Mold Lessons
Our family learned the hard way about the devastating effects of mold and mycotoxins. I am not a health professional or a mold remediation expert, but my hope is that some things we’ve learned on our arduous journey toward health might be useful to you and your family. I’ll be sharing our steps and things we learned about mold/mycotoxin illness in this blog.
We worked with many professionals, and they oversaw the things we did. They helped us make significant progress toward a clean home with good air quality, and ways to detoxify our bodies and heal from mold illness/CIRS.
First up, I’ll share recommendations for the doctors and building biologists we used in our area, and a website full of sound information that may be able to help connect you to experts in your area. Then I’ll get into some of the details of our mold story.
Firstly, if you suspect that mold is affecting your family, I strongly recommend visiting this website. It offers a ton of information, not just a book to purchase.
Mold Illness & the Surviving Mold Official Book | Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker
If you are in the Chicagoland area, we love Functional M.D. Dr. Stephen Nitz and his functional nurse, Jenny. They can order a Mycotoxin Urine test from RupaLabs (Formerly Great Plains Labs).
For us, we found that following Dr. Neil Nathan’s advice in his book, TOXIC, and having our son take a glutathione supplement, along with a hot shower or a far infrared sauna the night before testing worked the best in helping his body release some of the stored toxins. We had done a Labcorp mold test several years earlier to see if mold was a contributor to his chronic illness, but that test grew nothing in the lab. The provoked mycotoxin test, however, showed that our son was definitely being affected by mold exposure. His test results were off the charts for Citrinin and out of range for several mycotoxins specific to Aspergillus pennicillum. I have a link to Dr. Nathan’s book below.
Meet Our Team – Integrative Medical Associates (imarockford.com)
Integrative Medical Associates
7177 Crimson Ridge Drive
Suite 5
Rockford, IL 61107
Phone:815-977-7019
Fax:815-768-1793
Email:[email protected]
Read more about the mycotoxin test we used here:
MycoTOX by Mosaic Diagnostics (formerly Great Plains) (rupahealth.com)
Toxic: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities , and Chronic Environmental Illness Paperback by Neil Nathan MD
Home Inspection:
We worked with Larry Schwartz of SafeStart Environmental to help us with our home. His business is located in Buffalo Grove, IL, but he came to our home two hours away to inspect it and give us his recommended protocol. He is expensive, but is a renowned expert in the field. I will share some first steps you can do yourself that aren’t as expensive. The Surviving Mold site may be able to help you find a mold inspection expert near you.
phone: 847-913-9200
Whether you use Larry or someone else, please be sure that you use a different inspector than remediator!
We learned the hard way that air mold testing isn’t really the best type of home mold test. It is hard to determine where the mold is hiding and a clever remediator can scrub the air before their follow up test to make your home look pristine when it isn’t. At least that is what happened to us when we were buying our current home and trying to ensure that it was a clean environment before we purchased it.
Larry taught us that doing several HERTSMI dust tests (or ERMI tests if you can afford it) would give us the most information about whether or not our home had water damage and what types of mold were in our home. HERTSMI identifies the levels of the top five toxic molds while the ERMI identifies many more mold species.
Larry used Mycometrics and later we were able to work directly with them. This cut the costs down significantly, but Larry’s expertise is still unbeatable if you can afford him or someone else recommended on the SurvivingMold site. Please click the link below for prices and more info.
Mycometrics: From Research to Diagnostics
Their site will show you how to collect dust from your home using a clean Swiffer-type cloth and then sealing it in a ziplock bag.
If you can afford to do several HERTSMI or ERMI tests in different zones of your home, that will help you determine where the mold is lurking. One zone might come back as safe and the other might come back as unsafe especially if you or someone in your family has chronic illness.
The top five toxic molds are:
Stachybotrys
Chaetomium
Penicillium/Aspergillus
Fusarium
Ascospores
They can wreak havoc on the body, and are even more dangerous for people who have genetics which don’t detoxify mold or mycotoxins well. I’ve read that about 25% of the population have a genetic predisposition toward having this difficulty to detoxify mold. Clearly living in a water damaged, toxic mold environment can make anyone sick, but those of us with certain genetic profiles are even more susceptible to getting very sick, and chronically sick from mold exposure. For our family, being in a mold environment compromised our immune system and made it much more difficult for our kids to heal from Lyme disease and its terrible cohorts.
After Larry inspected our house using moisture gauges and infrared cameras and a keen eye, he didn’t find any real concerning areas. We bought a house with plaster walls and on a slab (no basement or crawl space) because those features were least conducive to mold.
However, after getting our Mycometrics HERTSMI test results back, and finding that at that time our home was out of range, Larry’s #1 recommendation for us was to get rid of all the carpet in our home. We replaced ours with vinyl flooring that is pretty much water proof. We did not want anything to do with laminate which can be damaged by spills.
Removing our old carpet and carpet pads had to be done very carefully so as not to contaminate the rest of our home even more!
Thankfully our living room did not have carpet, so for us it was the bedrooms and family room that had to be dealt with. Thick plastic was put up over bedroom doors and sealed, bedroom windows were opened, fans used to suck air out. Special clothes coverings and hardware store masks rated to be safe for working with molds/mycotoxins were all used. (The kind which seal around your face and have special filters! Not N95 masks.) Carpet was dumped out the bedroom windows and NOT carried through our home! And the concrete slab underneath was mopped with a mold killing solution while well ventilated. Walls were washed with Larry’s mycotoxin dissolving recipe, etc.) After the work was done, clothes were immediately put in a garbage bag and washed according to Shoemaker’s laundry protocol.
And, low and behold, under my daughter’s carpet on her carpet’s pad we discovered a huge circle of mold. There had been a leak of some kind in her room and I’m sure they thought they’d dried the carpet sufficiently, but they hadn’t. The HERTSMI test had picked up on this, but until we took out the carpets we didn’t know where one of the mold sources were hiding.)
We believe that mold had not only caused problems with my daughter’s health, but had also caused several pet hamsters to die much earlier than their lifespan indicated. The mold didn’t have an odor. It was just there sending out it’s invisible poison. We also found mold on the back of her dresser, which had been thoroughly cleaned before bringing it in her room originally. We also found mold on the backs of picture frames on the cardboard and on the back of a cheap organizer with a cardboard back. The mold spores and mycotoxins from that mold and other areas of mold that we eventually discovered in our home, was invisibly and odorlessly spreading and effecting three out of four of us seriously.
Later, we realized that my son’s air conditioning window unit was full of mold and making him extra sick. We also found that our old top loading washer that came with the house was harboring mold gunk inside and had a leak. Both of those appliances had to go!
The last major mold bastion we discovered a couple years later was in our three-season room. My daughter had made it her hang out space one spring and within a few weeks her behavior started changing with sensory issues going crazy etc. I prayed hard and felt the Lord telling me to just clean that room again. I uprooted my daughter from her new nest and started deep cleaning. I discovered a small circle of white mold where construction had been poor and paneling had been effected by being put up against concrete. My husband got the crow bar and that paneling went straight out the back door. I cleaned again like crazy, but he decided to remodel that room a few months later when the kids and I were on a long vacation to see my family. He called me to tell me that when he got to the paneling near the other window ac unit in our home he found the wall full of black mold. Again, it had been totally odorless and had not given any sign of being there on the side of the paneling we could see. BUT IT WAS THERE and it had huge effects on my daughter within just a few weeks of her being in the same room with it.
The threat of mold is real — I hope the resources and experiences I’ve shared will be of help for you if it is affecting you and your family!
Using a professional remediation company with a good reputation and a true respect for mold is definitely recommended. You cannot just paint over mold using some special paint.
Remember, use a different inspector than remediation company. You can become much sicker if mold remediation - even carpet removal - is done carelessly.
There is hope. There is help. It does take work. God is faithful. We prayed. We looked to Him for help. We sought His face. We clung to Him. And He came through for us in more ways than we can count.
Psalm 46:1-3 NASB1995
“God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride. Selah.”FOR MORE ENCOURAGEMENT DURING HARDSHIP, PLEASE CONSIDER BUYING MY BOOK: Journey into Trust
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Photo Credit: Photo by: Dan Meyers unsplash-image-hluOJZjLVXc.jpg
