Here we go again...

If you've been following along since the beginning, you know there were a few different levels of our exposure - my symptoms being the most widespread, but our son's being just as troubling with an unidentified cough that didn't go away with any treatment for months (until we moved).

Now the hubby, out of nowhere, developed a cough this fall that won't go away, despite treatment with cough medicine, steroids, an asthma inhaler or antibiotics. Sound familiar? I thought so too.

We've been trying to figure out what on earth would cause a sudden chronic cough in the one member of our family that has been relatively healthy all along. Suddenly it hit me... the hubby, who works in education, changed school districts this fall. He's been in a new environment. What if one of his schools has a mold problem? How would we know?

I asked him (without telling him why) whether he feels like his cough is better or worse at home or at school. He told me it's always worse at school.

Now it gets more complicated - he used to be a classroom teacher, but is now working as a district-level employee, assigned to a couple of different schools and the district office, so how do we know (if it's mold) where the mold is? And since it's not our property, how do we go about getting testing done to find out? Will the school district play ball?

Back at square one?

I'm better than I was earlier this week, when I reported the co-working troglodyte who decided painting indoors in a poorly ventilated office was a great idea. But I'm not as good as I was the day before that... it's hard to say back to normal, as I haven't been back to normal in a very long time.

Where does that put my treatment plan? No idea. I go back this afternoon for more needling. Poke, poke, poke. It has really been helping my energy levels in general, although this feels like kind of a setback. I'll certainly ask my practitioner for some advice moving forward. I was thinking about seeking out a sauna to do a little more detox on my own.

To be honest... I'll just be happy not to wind up in Stanley's Death Park.

Make. It. Stop.

People who don't have chemical sensitivities can still relate to this - painting in an enclosed space is foul, whether you've been exposed to mold or not.

But my reaction seems to be extreme. My ears hurt. My chest is tight - almost like my lungs are crackly. That probably doesn't make any sense. And my head is spinning.

Why? Some jerk face is painting in the office this morning. We don't have windows that open. The acupuncture continues to help with stuff like my energy levels... I'm like a new human being for the most part. But then stuff like this happens and reminds me just how far I have to go. Bleh.

The experiment continues

So I went back on Friday for my second round of acupuncture (do you call it a round? A treatment? A... poking?), and I found it to be every bit as relaxing as the first visit. I think I dozed off a little bit - but my feet kept twitching just as I would nod off, which kind of woke me back up as I was worried about jarring the needles or hurting myself somehow.

I do feel like I had slightly more energy between the first session and the second. It wasn't a rush of energy by any means - just didn't feel quite as bone-tired as I did the day before the first treatment. I'm certainly still tired. It's just not as bad? Maybe. I want to give it more time to evaluate. My Saturday mornings typically come like this - I wake up, I do things for a little while, and then the exhaustion catches up with me mid-morning and I lay back down. This Saturday, after both sessions, was no exception.

I also came home with an herbal supplement called imperial tonic that I am to take twice a day. I only took my first dose this morning so I can't reliably comment yet on whether it is helping. Stay tuned!

A brave new experiment

So, I've always thought of Chinese medicine as quackery, I'm a little ashamed to admit. It just sounded like snake oil to me. I pictured Mr. Miyagi waving his hands over my abdomen and chanting while incense burned in a shady backroom.

I was wrong.

Three years after the initial exposure to the mold (although before we knew what was making us sick), I finally got brave enough to try something I had heard a long time ago might help my persistent chronic fatigue issues - acupuncture.

I had my first appointment today, in a well-lit, clean office attended by a blue-eyed Pennsylvania transplant wearing a lab coat.

It took me a long time to get over my initial reaction to the idea of acupuncture in general - helped along by talking to some other seemingly normal people I trust who have also taken the plunge.

What was it like? I could sort of feel a few of the needles just barely as they went in, but only for a second. When he finished putting all of them in where he wanted them, I felt as though suddenly my muscles weighed a ton and I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and burrow into a cocoon of sleep. Sort of like being put under anesthesia - your limbs literally get heavy, then your eyelids.

I didn't actually fall asleep - I was too acutely aware of my own anxiety for that - but it made me very relaxed, and I was able to breathe more deeply in that 20 minutes than I felt like I have in probably three years.

It's too early for me to tell if this is helping me or if it really is just kind of a placebo. But this long after the exposure, what have I got to lose?

Mold and new chemical reactions

So it turns out the Boy Wonder is allergic to roll-on deodorant. We discovered this earlier this week because the hubs suggested he was starting to smell rather like a then-13-year-old certain older brother of mine. (I only have one brother. You do the math.) We both agreed 8 was a bit young to start having serious B.O. issues, but shrugged and decided to buy him something easy to apply and unscented.

And... he's got hives. Under his arms. Which I can tell you from my personal experience with various post-mold hives experiences can't be fun. Any time I've wound up with them in a crease (like the insides of my elbows or knees) it's been an extra layer of misery.

I can't prove, of course, that these new allergies he and I have been developing over time are related to mold. But who on earth is allergic to unscented deodorant? I mean... it's already unscented.

I've noticed myself I'm a lot more sensitive to smells than I used to be - like painting when they remodeled at work, or when we had to have some new tires put on the van and one of the workers got axle grease inside on the floor mat - my head hurts even thinking about the smell.

Is this our new life now? Or eventually, do you adjust and stop having to worry about every new chemical encounter in the universe?

Marvin K. Fatigue, won't you please go now?

I've about had it with the fatigue.

I can function, in the sense that I can go to work and I can pick up my son from school. But I'm not functional, in the sense that really minor tasks completely exhaust me.

Case in point: Sunday, I went to church and did music team like I usually do. I came home, made a grocery list, and went to Wal-Mart, fully intending to then come home and make dinner for the Boy Wonder and the Hubs.

Grocery list? Check. Wal-Mart? Check.

And that's as far as I got. I pretty much just collapsed on the couch the second I got the groceries put away, and was useless for the rest of the evening, until finally I gave up and just dragged myself to bed.

It's better than it was, believe it or not. There were times when we lived in the moldy apartment that I couldn't have gone to church or the grocery store to begin with. And I'm not this tired *all* the time. But I yearn for a time when I'm not so easily wiped out.

RSV and mold

So the Boy Wonder has been sick for what feels like for-flippin-ever - it hasn't really been that long, but definitely longer than your old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill cold. Friday, we decided it probably wasn't "just a cold" and went in to see our family doctor, who diagnosed him with Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV.

RSV is actually really common - most of us have been exposed by the time we're toddlers, and while it can be REALLY serious for infants, older children and adults get RSV and think they've just got a bad cold.

Mold, of course, makes every little illness the Boy Wonder and I get a completely different animal than it used to be. There is no normal or usual or "most people" for us anymore.

Every time either of us gets sick now, we have this hacking asthmatic cough that's tough to get rid of - and RSV tends to cause a hacking cough anyway.

So here's my dilemma as the mom of a mold-sensitive eight-year-old: how do I know the difference between "we were exposed to mold and we're just going to have a cough when we're sick" and "holy crap that's the worst cough in the universe, you need to get that kid to the ER, stat!"?

Google is a great resource, I've found, but when it comes to mold consequences, and boy are we living with them, it's been really tough for me to find stuff that applies to us. What affects one person who's been exposed doesn't necessarily define what will affect another. Google "mold and RSV," and you'll come up with a lot of advice about keeping your humidifier clean so it doesn't grow mold. Nothing about the effects of RSV on children who've been exposed to mold. Do I need to be thinking about breathing treatments for him, or can we just ride it out together on the couch? I have no idea. Right now, as with everything post-exposure, I'm just playing this by ear.

What it's like

I've tried many times to explain to people who aren't sensitive to mold what it feels like to be so bone-tired you can't function. I think of all the symptoms I connected to our exposure, the one that really kicked my rear end was the fatigue.

So I was oddly relieved to find this woman's website, which detailed the fatigue in a way I hadn't been able to. She's got a gift for explaining it, writing, "the first clue came when I gave a seminar in Portland, Oregon, and realized that I felt better and slept better in a hotel than in my own home. I then understood that I was not ill with some chronic disease that had yet to be diagnosed; it was my house, not me. More and more, I appreciated that if I was out of the house for a few hours, I started to feel like a normal human being; however, I only had to be in the house for 10-20 minutes before I thought I needed to take a nap. Sometimes, I barely had time to put groceries into the refrigerator before the enervation overcame me. The naps were often hours long. When I got up, I was all right for a few minutes and then usually wanted to go back to bed."

I can so relate. (And reading about what happened to her pets just breaks my heart.)

I think the first inkling I had that something inside our old apartment was making us (the Boy Wonder and I, anyway) sick was a trip we took "home" to visit my dad, who lives on the other side of the country, in February 2009. We had been in the apartment since the summer before. All of us felt better while we were on vacation for that week. It's hard for me to speak for the Boy Wonder, because his only symptom he complained about was the cough, but I know for me, I was much much much worse after we got back home.

In fact, it was that visit that really prompted me to seek help. I hadn't realized how bad I felt until I felt better by leaving and then worse. I still didn't connect it to the apartment yet - that was a connection I made later, when I actually discovered the mold. I think at that point in the exposure, the brain fog was so severe, I couldn't possibly have put the pieces of the puzzle together. I just knew I was wiped out, and I didn't know why - but I was tired of being tired.

A heart for fighting mold

Today is national Go Red for Women day, the American Heart Association's campaign to make women aware of how deadly heart disease is. One of out three women dies as a result of heart disease. My mother, Rosemary, was one of the one out of three. So was her mother, Dorothy. So were her two sisters, Betty and Margaret.

Obviously, I have a vested interested in taking care of my ticker.

I'm particularly interested in recovering my health after the exposure to mold because I don't want to make things any harder for my heart than they already are. I have a lot of things going for me - I eat better than my mom did, I don't smoke (she did) and I'm aware of my family history of heart disease at a much younger age.

But there are a lot of unknowns out there. I know the mold has caused, for me, some breathing and lung symptoms - the asthma-like cough when I have a cold that seems to linger for weeks on end, for example, and the accompanying tightness in my chest.

Unfortunately, there's just not a lot out there about heart health and mold. You'll find a few references - like this one - but they tend to lack real information beyond "mold can affect your heart health." Or they have a panic-inducing intent because they're clearly written by lawyers who are hoping you will sue someone. Neither of the two really tell me what I want to know, which is what I need to be doing in the meantime!

Unclean! Unclean!

I owe another blogger for my starting to write about what happened to me. Andrea's family has a story that is so far worse, so far beyond anything we've been through, it almost seems silly to complain in comparison. But more than anything else, reading about her journey made me realize my journey wasn't so completely out there. I am not alone. There are others out there who've been through variations on a theme by Mold. Hers was the first blog I found, but it wasn't the last.

In reading about her fight with mold and her family's struggles, I came across this blog describing a passage in the Old Testament about mold. I have a sudden urge to put four tassels on my cloak and send up a burnt offering, a spotless male lamb if possible.

OK, seriously, Leviticus 14 details the dangers of mold to the extent that a priest was supposed to examine a dwelling place and if necessary, order that its stones be torn out and cast away. Moses wasn't playing around with this stuff!

It made me wonder what other ancient wisdom there is about mold, if any. Did the Greeks pray to their gods on Mt. Olympus to rid them of the scourge? Did the Egyptians have to treat their mummies against mold?

Enter my good friend, Google. So I did a search on mold in history, and found an interesting theory - that the rumors of curses in the tombs of Pharaohs comes not from actual magic, but just plain old toxic mold spores. Mummies were often buried with food to feed them in the next life, and that probably did rot. I mean, it just stands to reason. No surprise then that modern archaeologists wear protective gear - masks and so on.

Maybe Howard Carter's team should've just called their priest to come inspect the tomb first. I'm thinking it would have saved a lot of trouble in the long run.

Sorting it all out

Some of you know I tried a vegetarian diet for about six months in a bid to lower my cholesterol (it worked, actually, and I was pretty happy eating vegetarian. I had less success in cooking separate meals for my family and myself, as I was the only one avoiding meat, so eventually, I decided chicken and fish are OK. It's probably a story for another blog that isn't about mold.).

What you may not know is that I also tried a mold-starvation diet in the summer after we moved into our townhouse to try to regain my equilibrium, a stricter eating plan on which I temporarily shunned pretty much all dairy and anything processed, plus some other things you probably wouldn't have thought to avoid.

The idea was to starve the mold so it couldn't thrive in my body anymore - make myself a tougher host for it. So I consulted information for people with mold allergies, and found there were specific foods they should avoid.

On the "don't eat" list - cheeses, mushrooms, dairy, hot dogs, lunch meat, bread, cereal, soy sauce, sauerkraut, pickles, vinegar and potatoes - notice the pattern of anything with yeast in it, anything pickled or fermented.

I stuck to it for a while, but eventually found I wasn't as sensitive as I had been immediately after the move and could eat some of those things again, which was around the time I started eating vegetarian.

I've been less strict about foods in the last three or four months and am now wondering if that could account for some of the more recent fatigue and itching. I'm also wondering about the humidifier I was advised to run at night to keep my sinuses moist - is it possible that's making it worse? Or, have I just turned myself into a worry-wort because I had this horrible mold reaction thing happen to me, and now I see it everywhere, even where it isn't? My fatigue, itching and cold that won't leave me alone make me think it's probably not in my head.

The back story

Where to begin? How do you boil down a journey of two years and change in just a few words?

Let me explain. No... there is too much. Let me sum up.

Three years ago, my family and I moved all the way across the country to pursue a bigger, better job for me. My husband and son were gracious enough to play along - it was actually a pay cut for the hubby, and for the Boy Wonder, a completely new school where he knew no one. But the recession hit harder and earlier where we were than it did where we were going, and the long story short of the decision to move was that it was better opportunities for me and meant I wouldn't face the layoffs that looked imminent at the old job.

We settled into an apartment that seemed like a good fit. It wasn't a terribly long commute for me, was reasonably convenient for the hubs and the Boy Wonder's school, and while rent wasn't cheap, it was affordable at least by local standards. The complex allowed pets which meant our beagle could come along for the ride. There was covered parking - the biggest plus of all in a much snowier climate than any of us were used to.

About three months after we moved in, I suffered a painful gallbladder attack. My gallbladder was removed in September of 2008.

Six months after we moved in, I started to notice a change in my energy levels. I was inexplicably tired all the time. There wasn't enough sleep in the universe to help me feel well-rested. I could nap all day. I could sleep all night. Wouldn't make a dent in my fatigue. I thought at first maybe the polycystic ovaries I'd known I had since long before my son was in the picture were flaring up - some kind of hormonal imbalance? Who knew? I scheduled a check-up just to make sure.

My hormones were fine. The fatigue kept getting worse. I struggled to stay awake at staff meetings and church. I was in real danger of nodding off between when I got up and when I went to work if I sat on the couch for more than a minute.

Eight months after we moved in, the Boy Wonder developed a cough that wouldn't go away. We took him to the pediatrician. Couldn't find anything genuinely wrong with him. They tried asthma medications, but they really didn't seem to help.

Hubby started breathing loudly in his sleep - sometimes snoring, sometimes gasping, snorting himself awake and then drifting back to sleep only to start the process all over again. He was diagnosed with sleep apnea and given a CPAP machine to use at night.

Around the same time, I started to realize I had other symptoms that might or might not have been connected to the fatigue, but were definitely not normal and definitely new to me: I was constantly itching. I was losing my hair at the temples. If I spent any time in the sun at all, I broke out in hives - and burned much more easily than I did before. Most troubling of all - at least to me - it felt like I was walking around with a fog around my brain. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't focus. My memory was awful.

Nine months after we moved in, I took all of the symptoms to my family doctor for help. I still didn't connect Boy Wonder's cough to the rest of it, so at this stage, it was only my symptoms we talked about. She decided I was depressed and needed to see a dermatologist. (I was already on anti-depressants, and it didn't feel like it had when I had my depressive episode a few years before. This was different. I was sure of it.) I was convinced our doctor had brushed me off without actually listening to my instincts, and I felt sure my instincts shouldn't be brushed off.

I decided I needed a second opinion, and I scheduled an appointment for a new doctor recommended by a coworker.

The weekend before the appointment with the new doctor, we closed on a home we were buying and started moving out of the apartment that had been our home for the past ten months. As the movers emptied my son's room of its furniture, they uncovered a sight that made me sick to my stomach: colonies of mold growing on the wall, hidden by where his bed had been, extending from the floorboard up to just under the top of the mattress height.

There was more mold - in our room, specifically next to my side of the bed, hidden by my nightstand, and again growing from the carpet up the wall.

I virtually ran out of the now empty apartment, having stopped only long enough to take a few photos with my phone to send to the hubby. I wouldn't go back for several days.

At the second opinion appointment, I described my symptoms and also told the new doctor about the mold I'd discovered. She asked whether anyone else had been sick at home, and I told her about Boy Wonder and his cough. She thought mold was the most likely explanation for my illness and my son's, but theorized the only way to know for sure would be to stay away from the apartment and see if we improved.

Later that week, hubby and I went back to the apartment to clean so we could turn in the keys and complain to the management. Within minutes of entering the building, I was itching and tired and hives appeared on my arms. Hubby sent me back outside while he cleaned without me.

Flash forward to now - Boy Wonder's cough is long since gone, as are my hives and - an unexpected benefit, hubby's sleep apnea. But my health is still affected. I get sick more easily and more often than I did before we lived in the apartment of death. It takes longer to heal. I get a horrible cough when I do get sick that feels a lot more like asthma than anything I'd ever experienced before the mold - a hacking cough that goes away when the sickness does, but requires breathing treatments when I'm sick. I am occasionally bothered by the itching and exhaustion - never to the same degree as it was at its worst, but enough that I can tell a difference.

So that's where we are. Fighting the good fight. Always on the hunt for things to make our overall health better and to continue to improve our condition post-exposure. Will I ever be completely back to normal? What's normal, anyway? I don't know. That's what bothers me the most.