Mold is something we all know about, or do we? I thought I knew about mold. It smells musty, it looks gross, and it's found everywhere. Right? Well that is true, but it should not be in our homes, in the walls, and under the floors, or in the basement, or attic. Mold can make some people very, very ill, and in some cases it even kills! The story below is our story. Our hope is that by telling what we have been through and we continue to go through, that others will learn about the dangers of mold, how to deal with it and when to leave it altogether.
5 years ago we moved to what we thought was "Our dream come true". We had a couple of acres of land to grow our gourds and a place for a veggie garden. A nice 3 bedroom 2 bath house. All nestled on a 194 acre farm.
In January of this year we all became very sick. High fevers, lungs full of gunk, head full of gunk. Our youngest daughter got a horrible infection in her ear that looked like white mold was growing all inside her ear. The doctor gave her antibiotics which did NOTHING for her! Our daughter is 9 years old and this was only the second time in her entire life that she has had to take an antibiotic, so it was not because she took them all the time that they did not work. I think it was because the doctor was treating one thing and it was actually something else that she had. It took two weeks for the infection to be totally gone. After the antibiotic not working for our daughter, we all started taking Olive Leaf Extract. Olive Leaf is a natural, (God's) antibiotic. It does not build up in the body as antibiotics do, and it will treat viral infections as well as, bacterial and fungal infections! After starting on the Olive Leaf we all started feeling better, but not 100%. We remained "almost well" for weeks and weeks. Then one day for some odd reason I don't even remember now, we moved our bed from where it was and when we did, we found black mold growing on the wall. The mold was growing on the corner walls where our bed was up against the wall. We immediately threw the mattress and box springs out, because the mold was all over them. With this discovery we began to understand WHY we had all been so sick for so long and WHY we were not getting entirely over it. We also began to understand why the outer east wall of our bedroom had always looked like something was eating the drywall under the paint. Moisture and mold was eating the drywall and had been since before we moved in. I also began to understand why our older daughters room had always smelled musty and moldy, and why she always seemed to get sicker than anyone else in the house. There was a serious mold problem with our home and it was making us all sick. We got all the mold cleaned off the walls, threw the bed out, and got an air mattress. We then started researching mold on the web. We learned more than we had been ready for.
By this time we all still were not 100% over the sickness we got in January, and it was now March! So we decided that we needed to get out of that room all together. So we moved our foam padding pallet, (the air bed broke!), and our clothes to the living room. We then called out the health department to check for mold. That was a joke actually, they check for moisture and look to "SEE" mold, but they do not test for molds. The man that came out did say that he could smell the mold so it was there, and he said there was moisture in the walls and the carpet. The carpet actually had mold growing in it! He also found moisture in our daughters room and in the wall. (This explained why I had smelled a musty, moldy smell in there since we had moved in).
Us like many people in this country think of mold as I explained it above. A musty odor and gross black or green or some other color that is growing on a wall or other surface. What people do not know about molds and funguses is that high levels of the stuff can make a lot of people very ill, and in some cases can be deadly! Some of the symptoms of toxic mold exposure is, Nasal Congestion, Irritation of the eyes, Inflammation of the sinuses, Irritation of the skin, Breathlessness, Headache, Runny nose, Fatigue, Cough, Sore throat, Hoarseness, Inflammation of the ear, Bleeding Lungs, Nose Bleeds, Memory Loss, Arthralgia ( Pain in the joints without swelling ) and the list goes on. For more in depth information on different types of molds and the dangers of them visit the links below.
Dan did most of the research and put together a number of web pages pertaining to what he found. You can see his pages by clicking here.
Once we had everyone moved into the living room, we had to decide what to do next. We felt that if we covered the hallway and stayed at the front of the house we would be safe from the mold while Dan cleaned it all up, or tried to clean it up. So Dan started working on the clean up. He had to first fix the moisture problem, which was a lot of cracks and holes in the mortar of the brick work of the outside of the house. So he started there. As he was filling gaps, cracks and holes, he got to a window that had severely rotted wood all around it. There was a huge piece of wood that had broken away and Dan looked in through the opening and found lots of pretty colors growing inside the wall of our bedroom!!! Same wall we had been sleeping against for a few months!
Next he had to till and re - landscape the ground in front of the house so it would slope down away from the house instead of into the foundation like it was. He made some ants pretty mad too, now they are invading our house by the thousands! He also had to tear out carpeting throughout the house. The allergens the carpet was holding was causing allergy trouble for me. A plus to my allergies, I can no longer live in a house with carpeting : ) I have always hated carpeting, it is one of the nastiest thing man ever invented!
Dan has spent so much time and has worked so hard to clean up the mold here, but it seems the more he does at this point, the more mold he finds and the more him and I both get sick. Dan's breathing has gotten to a scary point, he has times that he just cannot breath in without a lot of difficulty! The kids do not seem to be affected by it like we are so long as they stay out of that end of the house.
We've arranged a converted room in the garage so that the kids have their own "domain" to go to and work on their school work or read or play games. It wasn't practical to do during the summer because their is no AC in that room, but with cooler temps upon us it works as it is heated : ) This will make our situation more bearable over the winter while we work on saving up enough so that we can move to a healthier home.
Not only do we have to save in order to move, but we have to replace over 50% of our belongings because we had no place to store our things, so they sat in all the contaminated rooms and now they are contaminated to the point they have to be burned. All our clothes we did not get out may be able to be washed with vinegar, but will the vinegar smell come out when we re - wash them will be what decides if we can keep those or not. All the wooden furniture has to go, the kids stuffed toys, all the Bible study books that were in our bedroom. All our beds have to be replaced, our dressers, all most everything. I thank God for the sense to wrap all our wedding albums and my dads burial flag in plastic or we would have lost those too. We've lost so much, but the worst of it is loosing our health. For someone who is highly allergic to molds, which I now know I am, it can be very devastating, and sometimes a very painful ordeal.
I have always had a sensitivity to just about everything, certain plants, pollens, dust, chemicals, medications, etc. We moved to the house we live in now 5 years ago this November. The second Spring we were here I noticed that my allergy to tomato plants, (I can eat the fruit), had gotten much worse, and I could no longer mow the grass without breaking out in a red rash all over my face and arms that itched and burned something horrible. Over the past 5 years it has gotten almost unbearable. Not that it is excruciatingly painful. It's just aggravating to burn and itch just because you picked a few tomatoes, or mowed the grass. It's even more frustrating though, when the same thing starts to happen when you dust or sweep, when it never was a problem before.
My allergies have grown and are now magnified to the point that I'm almost constantly itching, sneezing, coughing, have a runny nose, headaches all the time, swelling and extreme pain in my legs, ankles, feet and knees as well as my wrist and hands. My whole body hurts. I have horrible pains in my chest, ribs, and back. It hurts so bad in my chest at times, that in the beginning, I questioned if I wasn't having a heart attack! When I leave the house for extended periods of time I feel better to a degree, unless I end up in a building that has mold in it. Then I know it pretty much right away. I will either begin coughing, sneezing, itching, or get an instant headache.
I honestly believe the reason for my increase in allergy's is from my mold exposure in this house. There is no doubt in my mind at all that the mold has been here since before we moved in, that means myself and my entire family has been exposed to it and breathing it in for close to 5 years now! The thing I do not understand is why it got so bad over the past year.
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