Our Mold Story
Hi! We're the Smith family. Over the past several years, our family of 8 has been battling a toxic mold exposure that destroyed our health and changed our lives forever. Our hope is that our story will help encourage other families that are experiencing significant health issues because of toxic mold. Wherever you are in the journey, there is hope and you are not alone.
Video Overview
00:00 - Intro
01:38 - Our Family Before Mold
05:20 - Beginning of Health Problems
06:40 - Abby's Seizures
13:45 - Lily's G.I. & other Health Issues
17:25 - Lily Begins Having Seizures
19:30 - Lily's Neuro-Psychiatric Symptoms
23:25 - Hearing "Mold" for the First Time
25:43 - Coming to Grips with Mold
27:50 - Creating a List of Family Symptoms
29:40 - Finding the mold
31:32 - Evacuating & Remediation
34:38 - A Brutal Summer, Lily's Extreme Symptoms
38:23 - Realization that we can't live in our House Anymore
40:21 - Learning About Brain Inflammation
41:50 - Lily Diagnosed with PANS
45:55 - Moving & Starting the Healing Process
47:35 - Our Heart to Help Other Families
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Between 2019 and 2022, that became a pretty common response that would we would snarkily offer up when friends would ask us casually, “how are you?”.
It all feels like a bad dream when you’re in the middle of it. Another ambulance ride, another day with a new weird medical symptom that you can’t explain, another doctor that looks at you like you’re crazy.
Not only are you dealing with extreme medical symptoms that seem to have no explanation, one of the hardest things to navigate is the loneliness and that seemingly no one can understand what you are going through.
Once you discover that your medical issues are likely caused by toxic mold, it’s a bit of cold-comfort because that is when big decisions have to be made and the real hard work begins. The questions are endless - and it doesn’t help that mold can cause extreme anxiety and brain fog. Even the smallest decisions can feel earth shattering and painfully difficult.
Some of the questions that we asked and labored over:
How can we know for sure these symptoms are caused by mold?
How do we properly test environmentally for mold?
How do we test for mold in our bodies?
Once we have test results how do we determine the scope of the problem?
What if we know we have mold but can’t locate it in the house?
Who can we trust to give us advice?
Should we just evacuate and leave everything behind?
Do we remediate - is that even a viable option financially?
Can we clean our stuff or do we need to throw it away?
How can we be sure that the remediation worked?
How do we detox?
Why are we still sick? Are we still being exposed?
Are we being exposed to mold at a place other than our house?
Are we ever going to get 100% better?
Maybe you have asked some of these questions and others. It’s intense right?!
Unless you’ve been through it, you simply can’t understand the intensity of what it’s like to watch your entire family get suddenly (and violently) ill, and in the midst of dealing with health issues, realize that you may have to leave your home and everything you own behind.
It can affect every area of your life from your health, finances, relationships, marriage, mental health, and so much more.
In a word, it’s devastating.
That is the reason we want to share our story. To let other families know that there is hope. By God’s grace we made it through the worst of our mold journey, and while we still have a long road ahead, because of what we’ve learned along the way, we believe we can be of some small help to other families that have been devastated by mold.
We’d love to meet you and hear your mold story!
