69 | Toxic Mold Tests I Wish I Did Earlier in my Chronic Illness Journey | Mold Illness Series 2

Aubree Felderhoff: For the first seven years. I didn't have a diagnosis I went to over 31 doctors all across the country searching for a diagnosis and I got everything across the board. I had a brain tumor. I had a heart problem. I possibly had MS. I had Lyme. mean every possible diagnosis I felt like was put on me all the way to you have nothing but mental illness and basically a mental breakdown. if you guys are going through that, if you've had, symptoms for a long time and you've gone to the doctors and you've changed your diet and you've changed out your water filter and you've switched out those cleaners to the non-toxic you've done all the quote unquote right things. You are getting the fresh air and the sunshine and all the things that we're told to do to be healthy. And maybe you would even stop. treatment on some of the things that you're suffering with and yet it's not going away. It's not getting better. You're really not seeing any results at all. Maybe you're even seeing more symptoms that don't have anything to do with the original thing that you sought treatment over. That's very, very common in mold Welcome back to mom intentional. We are on part two of a mold illness series and if you are just joining us the last couple weeks I have shared the journey that my family and I have been on not once but now twice Dealing with mold in our home and all of the fun that comes with that And so I encourage you you haven't yet listened to go back and listen I share a lot about first just our journey and secondly all of the symptoms that I myself and my kiddos dealt with and today I promise that I would tell you guys how to actually know if you are dealing with mold either in your body or and in your home because a lot of times people are struggling with mold and it may not even be from your home, which I think sometimes we get blindsided by that. Like, what do mean? It's not my home. Well, it could be at your place of work. It could be at your kid's school. It could be at your kid's daycare. It could be at the gym anywhere that you spend a large amount of time. you are exposing your body to more and more toxins. And if you are struggling or your toxic bucket is overflowing, then that is eventually going to cause a lot of chronic issues if you don't address it. So before we dive into how to even know if you have mold, I want to make sure that I let y'all know I am definitely not a medical doctor or a medical professional. So These episodes that I'm sharing in my series are simply my story, my family and I's story and our experiences. And we have had, after this is year 12, 12 years of dealing with this, we have had a lot of experiences. So in today's episode, I'm going to share some of the experiences, some of the testing, some of the things that we did that did not work for us. And that is not to say that it will not work for everyone. It's going to depend on your genetics and your situation and the environment that you're living in or working in or wherever that mold is. as well as a lot of other factors. So take what I am saying as simply my story. I wanted to make sure that y'all knew that because I've had a lot of people reaching out and messaging me about their own situations. And so I just want to put that out there as a disclaimer that I can share my story, but I cannot diagnose or treat. I can simply share what has worked for us and what has not worked for us. All right. So now that we're through all of that kind of legal mumble jumble, let's get into today's episode. Now if you listened last week and I had quite a few people that reached out and said my gosh I listened a lot of the symptoms that you were discussing Feel like you're peeling back the layers on myself or my child Okay, what do we do? I'm hoping that today's episode is going to save you and your family So much money so much time so much suffering and struggle down the road because I can tell you For the first seven years. I didn't have a diagnosis I went to over 31 doctors all across the country searching for a diagnosis and I got everything across the board. I had a brain tumor. I had a heart problem. I possibly had MS. I had Lyme. I had, mean every possible diagnosis I felt like was put on me all the way to you have nothing but mental illness and basically a mental breakdown. And so I'm hoping that today I can, if you guys are going through that, if you've had, you or your loved one have had symptoms for a long time and you've gone to the doctors and you've changed your diet and you've changed out your water filter and you've switched out those cleaners to the non-toxic or you you've done all the quote unquote right things. You are getting the fresh air and the sunshine and all the things that we're told to do to be healthy. And maybe you would even stop. treatment on some of the things that you're suffering with and yet it's not going away. It's not getting better. You're really not seeing any results at all. Maybe you're even seeing more symptoms that don't have anything to do with the original thing that you sought treatment over. That's very, very common in mold because mold affects all different areas of the body. And so it often looks from the outside looking at it, it often looks as if you just have these random symptoms that are not associated. Maybe you've got some eye problems going on. Maybe you've got skin or gut issues that just don't resolve despite. all of your friends telling you to do this collagen and this diet and all of these supplements. And yet it's just not healing and it's so frustrating. And you're thinking, it's gotta be me. I must be doing something wrong. That was me for a really long time. Even with all of the functional medicine doctors and the regular doctors and the specialists and the integrative medicine doctors and the chiropractors and the acupuncturists. I mean, I was seeing so many people. It's a bit of a whirlwind. It's confusing. It's frustrating not to mention we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this. So my hope and prayer for you today, friend, is that by hearing my story and kind of what we've gone through and what we've explored and what we've tried and what has worked and what has not worked, it will save you so much time, suffering, possible diagnoses and money in the long run. So let's get into how do we even know if we have mold? Okay, and there's a lot of different viewpoints from a lot of different doctors on this out there. And it's because mold is kind of a newer subject. For a long time, mold was either unrecognized, or misunderstood. As I talked about last time in the last episode, I thought of mold as what happens in your shower grout when you've missed a week of cleaning or kind of a buildup of soap sets. I didn't understand how actually common indoor toxic mold is and how extremely dangerous it is for your health. Just like if you consider a bottle of bleach, I think everyone on the planet knows you would never ever. down the bottle of bleach, right? It is not meant to go in your body. It is very, very harmful and toxic. The same is true with mold in our body. It is not meant to be in our body. And one of the things that you hear so often, and I've heard so often from people who didn't understand my condition and what I was going through is, meh, mold is everywhere. We all have mold. It's outside. It's a naturally occurring thing. It's not really that big of a deal. And though it is an outdoor organism that God created, it is part of the planet. It is not meant to be indoors. And mold releases mycotoxins, which if you picture a dandelion, you know, one of those little wish flowers that your kids will pick and blow out. And once all those tiny little pieces of the dandelion go off into the wind, their wish comes true. those mold spores are like those little wispy pieces of the dandelion. They're about the same size as the particles of COVID, okay, for reference. They are teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny. You can hardly see them under a microscope. And they are not alive. Mycotoxins, which is released from mold, are not living organisms. They are not mold. Mold is living. It needs water or moisture or food to grow. But mycotoxins are not. And what happens is the mold begins to grow inside the house through leak, moisture, and they start to release these teeny, teeny particles that are so tiny we cannot possibly see them into the air. It's a self-protective mechanism that mold uses in order to kill off all of the other mold species, kind of survival of the fittest, if you will. And so if you are living in a home where mold, which already is not ideal for us, is off shooting these mycotoxins to kill all of the other molds out there. Can you imagine what that's doing to your health as you're breathing it in constantly? It's like downing bleach every day. It is not good for you and it's not meant to be in the house. It's meant to be out in the sunshine where the sun takes care of it and the wind disperses these mycotoxins and other molds compete to not make them. so strong and dominant. But when we're in an indoor facility and we've got just this mold that's off shooting all of these toxins into the air with no sunshine, no wind to disperse, which means we have a massive load of these things in a very concentrated area and no other competing factors. Not to mention the houses that are built nowadays are built to be basically tight blocks that don't let anything out, right? We're energy efficient and we're air efficient. We've got all of these constructs around our homes to keep air from going out. Well, also with that, with this new building of just a tight, tight foundation that's so tight knit, it can't sweat, it can't get anything out, comes a buildup of these spores if you've got an indoor mold issue. And so how do we know, right? That's what today's podcast is about. How do we know that what we're dealing with is mold and not leaky gut, not allergies, not just constant skin rashes or hair loss or thyroid and hormone dysregulation? How would we know that it's mold? Well, we test. And there's a lot of different camps on testing. And I can spend a lot of time telling you about the testing that did not work for me because after I got my diagnosis, seven years after I got sick, I then spent four years for the most part. getting worse or staying the same because I was being treated incorrectly. And so I'm not going to spend the time to tell you about all the stuff that didn't work. And feel free, if you're on this mole journey and you are in the boat I was in where I'm spending so much money and time and feeling worse and worse, and the doctors are telling you, it's normal and that's part of the die off and it's going on for years, please contact me. And I would love to share more in depth about that. But instead what I want to do is I want to direct you to what has been working and let you begin to research and make that decision on your own. So I found a doctor, his name is Dr. Andrew Campbell, and he is one of the pioneering researchers on biotoxin and mold illness. He is highly, highly distinguished. He has treated over 17 or 18,000 patients as of now. He's been doing over 40 years. And he has an incredible, he's just an incredible wealth of information. And he puts it all out there online for free. He has webinars and podcasts and he really has a heart to share the message of how to treat and heal, not just treat, but heal from mold toxicity. And it really truly was a story for another day, but a godsend that I was able to locate him after working with so many doctors who as well-meaning as they were made me feel worse and get sicker and prolonged this illness. Dr. Campbell has a very easy way of testing the body and it's a blood serum test You order a kit. I believe at the time of this recording. I believe when I ordered it was 360 380 380 dollars you order it off of a website It comes to you. You go and get a poke and they test your blood send it off to a it is testing 28 different mycotoxins. And the IGG is looking at if you have been chronically exposed to mold, if possibly your body is colonized. And that's what happened to me. I lived in mold for seven years. And after we moved, even though I was out of mold and I was in a very clean home that for sure. had no mold, and for the most part my environment was controlled. So I was not being exposed to mold. I continued to get worse on other protocols. But part of the reason was I became the moldy house. So a lot of times with mold. If you were in it for a long period of time, your body eventually cannot continue to dump out these toxins, especially in today's day and age when we've got toxins everywhere. I don't think it's a secret to anyone that our food is toxic and our water is toxic and candles and fragrance and our cleaning products and going to the kids' schools where they use wipes. And there's so many toxins in the environment that our body is already constantly having to filter out. And then you add in this high amount of mycotoxins that's possibly in your workplace or your home. And the body after a while can no longer keep up. And so what happens is you begin to overflow in your body. And your body begins to allow mold basically mycotoxins to take resonance. And that is when you have colonization. And it can look different for different people. You can have colonization in your nasal cavity. And with that, you oftentimes will have symptoms like chronic, chronic cold, chronic allergies, chronic stuffy nose. That was one I felt like I could never breathe. I just could never get air in my nostrils. It was so annoying. But kind of that chronic upper respiratory issue. Maybe you keep doing a Z-pack. That was Mitch for a while. He kept doing a Z-pack. Then it would get better and then it would just come back. He'd get another quote unquote cold and it just, well, there was mold living in his nasal cavity. You can also have it in your lungs. And so you may have issues there where you feel more of some of the other symptoms I talked about. I'm kind of an encyclopedia of all these symptoms. So I have had a lot of them, but the air hunger, the cough, I had a cough, a constant tickly cough that wasn't wet, but it just was a constant cough over nothing. a lack of being able to breathe well. It constantly breathless, just out of breath. Obviously that affected exercise and movement. So there's a lot of symptoms. went back into that last episode, but once you become a moldy house, you will start to see on this testing your IgG as high. And so you look at all of your levels of mycotoxins, and if you're seeing IgG levels that are pretty high, you know that you've either been long-term exposed or you were exposed a long time ago. maybe not a long time ago, maybe a year ago, but you're not an exposure, but that mold is basically residing inside you. You are the moldy home. And then the IgE, which is the other side that he tests, that is looking at current exposure. If you have very high IgE, that would be a good indicator that you are currently dealing with mold and mycotoxins somewhere in an environment that you spend a lot of time. Could it be your home? Yes. But like I've told you earlier, it could be a lot of other places. And so those are the two things that he tests. They're very clear cut. And once you have the confirmation looking at those two. the next question is okay Where's the mold? that's the big question, right? If I clearly have mold toxicity in my body and it's showing me that in this blood serum test Where is it? Where is it coming from? Especially I think I told you guys last time Mold for us was invisible. It wasn't crawling up the walls. It wasn't very easy to see. A lot of times it grows in dark, moist places behind walls. There's certain types of mold that love sheetrock. It could be from improper roof, maybe a leak going into, I have a friend that that just happened to it went into their attic. They had no idea. They didn't see it and eventually got into the AC unit. So now these mycotoxins that are in the AC unit, which often is a big player from old, is now spraying mycotoxins all over the entire house. It can be really hard to find. And I will tell you through my family's failure after doing so many different things, I will tell you what worked for us. Okay? It's not a Petri dish that you go get at Home Depot. Do not do that. It is not a air test. You find a Groupon guy and he says he'll come do an air quality test. There are so many different factors there to make those tests invalid and they don't tell you anything about if there's actually mold and wear it is. So... Don't waste your time, don't waste your money. Now one thing that has some validity for us but has never actually been helpful for us is what's called an ERMI ⁓ test. And you use a Swiffer rag and you go around to areas that have high dust and you're supposed to Swiffer these areas in all the different areas of your house. And then you send it in this plastic bag and then the lab looks at it and it tells you based on the dust because mold spores are always in dust. It tells you based on the dust what the count is of the mold species. And you'll see green, yellow, red, and you'll kind of have an idea then of how bad your mold is. We've done this. We did it when we moved into our new house and our house came back very clean of mold. We did it again when I suspected mold the second time around. And it came back as a possible problem, but no water damage based molds. It was very confusing. And there's so many areas that can include user error. your... Swiffer dusting the top of doors and ceiling fans, but it can't be super old dust like the dust that we had we had just had construction so when we called of course it was you know, there's construction and all of your floors got jackhammered out and so that could have swayed because there's mold spores that are in wood that are just stagnant and when they Jack hammer out all those spores get released. We don't see any indication of water based mold, which is going to be the worst molds, right? The black mold that we always hear about and so based on if I just stayed with what they had said, all we needed to do was a small particle clean where you clean every inch of your house using a certain protocol and it would get rid of all of these mycotoxins because we didn't have mold in our house. That was their answer. We hired an actual accredited mold inspector to come into our home and inspect our entire home, look at everything, test and send off to his lab and then come back with a mold dog who was adorable. By the way, his name was Scout and he was so cute. But he came in, he has a PhD, guys. He has a PhD in environmental science. Okay, so it's not just a guy that's looking for a part-time gig, gets a little moisture meter and sticks it in a wall. He spent hours in our home and after he was done and the results came back, we got a full 28 page lab report. along with the exact protocol for remediation. Because guess what? We did have molds. We did have water-based mold growing behind our wall in the sheetrock and on all of the cabinets that were just built and brought in because they were wet and they painted over them and it trapped moisture and they grew mold. And luckily we painted the cabinets white and so I saw the mold coming through. You can look at a lot of different options and they're going to vary in price But I can tell you based on my own experience of going through this multiple times now that I wouldn't mess around I wouldn't mess around with a petri dish or the air testing or even the army test because Don't you want to know and start the path to healing if you're dealing with this or if your kid is dealing with this, don't you want to know where the mold is and what the heck to do about it and get started? Or do you want to do the Ermi test where you're Swiffering and then you have the results come back and then you have to order another Ermi for each room and Swiffer those separately so you can figure out which room it's in. And then you have to go hire either an mold inspector or a mold dog to come sniff out where the mold is. And then from there, you have to go find a remediation company and just trust that they're going to do it right. I didn't want to go down that path. And I've known many, many people that have gone down that path, unfortunately, and it didn't end up good. It wasn't done correctly. They didn't find all the mold. They moved back into their house after remediation. And shocking, there was mold somewhere else that popped up. It's really sad. It's such a waste of time and money. So my recommendation, which by the way, let me remind you, I am not a medical professional, but I am a girl that has struggled with this for over a decade and watched her family go through all of it and have done all the wrong and the right things. And the right thing for us was actually hiring a mold inspector who had a PhD in environmental science. And he came in and did a amazing job. and I walked away with full trust that we were going to get well, that we were going to be able to come home and our home would be safe to enter. And it was. It was. So I hope that this has been helpful. I know it was nitty gritty and just a lot of kind of the techie stuff, but I wanted to share. in hopes that maybe it will save some of you guys if you are starting to consider and wondering where do I even go about maybe it will save you years of researching or years of suffering or thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. That is my hope. And you guys have already been reaching out those of you that maybe have been considering that mold might be something that's going on with you. But I just want to extend an open door. If you have questions or concerns or want to know a little bit more about this testing side of things, feel free to email me. My email is linked at the bottom of this and I would be happy to. hold your hand and try to walk you through this process because it is a journey and it's just nice to know sometimes that you're not alone. You're not alone. You're not crazy. You're not trapped. You're not stuck. And if you have been suffering for years or months even, or your kids, it doesn't have to stay this way. And I know there are many, many, many months slash years where I lost hope. And I really thought this is just what it feels like to be this age with kids, or this is just what it's going to be. This is what God wants for me in my life. And it's not true. I'm here to tell you it's not true. I am still healing. I am still on this journey. I have gone now almost a decade without an answer, but I didn't give up. And I promise you, if you're searching for an answer, it's there. It's there. And God wants to reveal it. So number one, keep praying. Keep asking. Keep asking. And eventually you shall receive. Number two, keep your faith. God has got you, he has carried me all the way through this. Thank God I never would have made it without him. And number three, keep learning, keep growing, do not give up because there is an answer for you. next week we will be talking about healing. from mold or chronic illness, healing from pain, healing from all of the tough stuff that comes from this. So I'm excited to share with you guys and until next time, go win your day.