D. Deb 0:00Yeah, so today’s episode on Let’s Talk wellness. Now we are diving into the world of mold. Many of you have heard me speak about mold in the past. It has been a pillar in my own recovery of Ms. And today, I want you to meet a dear friend of mine. Her name is Andrea, and she is part of respirari Labs, but she also has been a consultant in the past for people struggling with mycotoxin illness. Mycotoxin illness is a tragedy, as far as I’m concerned, because it is so under diagnosed and misdiagnosed, because it’s just not well known by a lot of practitioners, certainly in the traditional world, but in the alternative world, it is a newer disorder that people are learning about, and not everyone is extremely knowledgeable about. And I think it really needs to be the forefront of a lot of these undiagnosed or misdiagnosed cases. We see a lot of mycotoxin illness at the
Dr. Deb 1:04root cause of neurological conditions, ALS, MS, Parkinson’s dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and if not treated and addressed, these disorders will not improve and sometimes end very tragically for us. So I want to introduce you guys to my dear friend Andrea today, and she will be a wealth of knowledge for you and hopefully put some of your fears at risk about remediation of your home, but also probably bring up some things that you never knew about, mycotoxin, illness.
AndreaThank you for those, those very kind words. It’s It’s wild that as I hear stories like yours and mine, so often it’s it’s wild how similar they are. And so these topics are so important to bring awareness to, and I appreciate the work that you’re doing to do that. So thank you for for being here and for letting me be here with you.
Dr. DebOh, you are so welcome. So tell us your story. How did this happen to you?
Andrea 2:05Got it? So it’s all, it’s all very ironic. In 2017 we were living in a rental home in Robbinsdale, and we were renting as we were kind of getting out of debt. I was a pre med student and starting up my family with my husband, who I who I met later in life, and our two year old daughter, contracted lead poisoning from our rental home. She She was chewing on a window sill, and I thought I bet there’s lead paint on that window sill. How we tested the window sill, sure enough, there was lead paint. Tested my little girl and she had lead poisoning. We weren’t financially ready to buy a house, but we qualified for just enough. My mom is incredibly smart. She’s been a realtor almost 50 years, and she helped us find a home. And so we found a home that we liked and a modest home, but clean and built in the 90s, so no lead paint. And we had, you know, a general inspection, and it didn’t really raise any red flags. And we moved in. So we moved into the home end of October of 2017 two months, almost two months to the date, later, our five year old dog died. She developed a very sudden neurological disorder. It was very rapid and and it was at the time we didn’t, you know, put pieces together, but it’s interesting that I, I somehow knew it was environmental, like I can’t, but I, but I didn’t put the pieces together. Anyways, my Upon moving in, my health started to decline, but as as it is for so many women,
Andrea 3:54I didn’t connect the dots, because I just had my third child. He was nine months, and I thought, well, maybe this is postpartum. I was experiencing migraines, and that wasn’t typical for me, without being pregnant, and my ears started to ring, I started to experience anxiety that was not typical for me, and it just kind of snowballed from there. And eventually I went into my doctor and I said, I’m having anxiety that’s not typical for me and and for me to go see a doctor over that, if you knew me, you would have to know it was pretty extreme. It was to the point where I couldn’t go to the grocery store and and so it just kind of got worse from there. And then it progressed into migraines that would last months at a time, and my my worst migraine lasted three months day and night. I mean, three consecutive months day and night. And it was so severe that at the time, my husband had to hide the guns in the house because I was I was suffering, and I was begging him to help me die. I mean, if you’ve ever had a migraine, maybe you can understand this. But on top of these migraines that I couldn’t control, I was confused, and
Andrea 5:10I couldn’t remember my children’s names. At one point, I looked at my oldest son and thought he was my baby brother. There was one day my husband came home and I, I wanted to say to him, did you see the email from Grace’s preschool teacher? And I couldn’t find my words. And finally, I just sat there and started crying. And my sweet, loving, patient husband said, Are you asking if I saw the email from Miss Annette? And I said, Yes, yes, that’s it. So I, you know, we made so many doctor visits and in the ER, and we kept saying to these doctors, you know, she’s, I’ve got this migraine, but I’m confused. And they would do CT scans, well, then it was, you need psychiatric help. You need a psychiatric evaluation. And my doctors were very, very frustrated with me.
Andrea 6:01In 2000 end of 2019 2020 I believe I was diagnosed with Lyme disease Bartonella Babesia, and that made sense to me. They think that I’ve had Lyme disease since I was a teenager. And that makes sense. I live in Minnesota, and I love to fish and be in the woods and forage mushrooms. So that made sense. We treated Lyme disease out of pocket for about a year, and by that time, I hadn’t worked in two years. I was mostly bed bound. I had inflammation throughout my body. I was dealing with just a myriad of very strange, debilitating health effects. And we’ve never been a one income family, so we were really struggling. My husband was a chef at the time. It was during, he was during the lockdowns. It was during covid And so his his pay was cut. He was working all the time. And then, you know, then we had like, these crazy out of pocket medical expenses. I said to my doctor at one point, because I wasn’t getting wasn’t getting better, I said, I think I might be living in mold. And I I’ve been reading about the Lyme and mold connection, and he was just like, Oh, I’m not really worried about that. The next time I met with him, I said, Doc, I know I’m living in mold. I can, I can see a little bit of it in my basement. And he says, I’m not worried about it. We’ll deal with it later. Well, later never came because we ran out of money. So by the time we figured out that that it was very the culprit was environmental. We were tapped out, and we didn’t have anywhere to go. And so we moved out to a tent in our backyard with our two small children or two dogs, and by this point, I was ready to take my life and and I I listened to your podcast interview, and it was so wonderful. And I love the fact that you mentioned that mycotoxins can cross the blood brain barrier, and this can cause inflammation in the brain, and that’s important to know, because it’s important for healthcare providers, for social workers, for professionals and for folks to know that mold exposure can manifest as mental health disorders. It can look like anxiety, depression, pans and pandas and kids, personality changes, dementia, you know, all of those things. And so, besides the fact that I was suffering, I was just very unwell with the swelling in my brain. And so I I rewrote my life insurance policy, and I was very aware of when it would pay out. I tripled the coverage, and then I plan to, you know, to take myself out of this world. And my thinking was is, I can’t live like this. I’m suffering. But also I knew my home was toxic. I could feel it. And you know, my husband, who’s got a healthy immune system, didn’t, and I knew I needed to get my kids out of this home and so, so we lived in the tent, and I had these plans in mind, nobody knew. And so I said, Well, if I am going to leave my children motherless, I’m going to fight like heck. So I started reading, because my education was in the sciences. I dove into everything I could. I read textbooks on mold remediation, indoor air quality, environmental testing. I reached out to professionals in the industry. Michael Pinto, he’s a wonderful professional and an educator. He sent me a free textbook. I read it cover to cover. I read everything I could on mold toxicity. I read Dr Neil Nathan’s book toxic. All of his suggested reads.
Andrea 9:43And I, two weeks into reading, I was talking over the heads of the professionals that I had hired, and that was really alarming to me, and they didn’t know what mycotoxins were and and I thought, wow, this is really unregulated so, so I became the professional that we so desperately needed. I recovered my health greatly fresh air and and good food and supporting my detox pathways. And we did remediate our house several times. By the way, the the small bit of visible mold in our basement was extensive. It was throughout our entire basement, everywhere, and it was very, very hidden. We just had no idea.
Andrea 10:30So by the time I recovered, I found a local company here in Minnesota, and I reached out to the owner, and I said, I want to work for you. And says, Well, I don’t know what you would do. You’re hypersensitive. And, you know, we do inspections and mold remediation, and I don’t know what I would do with you. So I chased him down for three months, and I was, we were about to lose the house, and I knew that this is where, where, where God was leading me to to work. This is, you know, all this education I had this is this was a seed that was instilled in my in my heart, to to work in this industry in some capacity. But how? So finally, after three months, I said to him, I said, Listen, if you don’t hire me, I’m going to show up at your doorstep. So he did. He finally and and the first day of work was kind of funny...
