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.