• momsAWARE - Living Healthy in a Toxic World
  • momsAWARE - Living Healthy in a Toxic World

Is Your House Making You Sick?

Is Your House Making You Sick? A Beginner's Guide to Toxic Mold

Are you curious about the hype over toxic mold? Have you experienced a mold exposure and are unsure of your next step? This valuable resource from momsAWARE's Andrea Fabry is designed to help you navigate your way through mold testing, remediation, exposure symptoms, detox methods, cross-contamination issues, legal recourse, and much more! It's a handy, concise guide offering hope and help for anyone concerned about indoor air quality and its effect on human health. Now available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions: Is Your House Making You Sick? A Beginner's Guide to Toxic Mold.

Mold Survival Stories

Have you experienced a serious toxic mold exposure or know someone who has? These stories will encourage anyone walking through this difficult valley. Read the accounts of several fellow travelers who have made it to the other side in our Mold Survival Stories.

  • Andrea Fabry - DumpstersOur family of 11 moved into our dream home in June 2000. Symptoms started immediately. It took a botched mold remediation to make the connection between our illnesses and the home. We vacated in October of 2008. We left everything behind.

    Within a few months it became clear that it would take more than leaving the home to restore our family's health.
  • Gregory Muske

    Tearing apart moldy kitchens and bathrooms was just another day at work.

    My health declined over decades. Eventually, I completely broke, in part because of being steeped in mold spewing from our new front-loading washing machine.

    Conventional medicine had no answers. I spent two years thinking I was going crazy, while researching on my own for 40-60 hours a week.

  • Grateful Grandmother

    I bob and weave.

    In 2008 I realized our home of 32 years was full of hidden toxic mold. I was too. My husband wasn't. The more I tried to save our home, the more ill I became, and our marriage as well.

    We moved to a hotel for six weeks and remediated the entire house, but not me. The house was clean, tested by the best. We disclosed everything, threw away everything, and sold the house.

  • Erik JohnsonIn 1986, Dr. Paul Cheney asked me, "How would you like to become a prototype for a new syndrome?"

    I refused, saying that my improvements due to staying out of moldy buildings would distract from his theory that our illness was caused by a virus.

    But Dr. Cheney insisted. So I became a participant in the study group that led the CDC in 1988 to recognize the illness that they named "The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome."

  • Kristina Townsend - Virgin Islands

    I was exposed to high levels of toxic mold while in the Virgin Islands in 2007. I was there for my job and was housed in a building that had been condemned two years earlier.

    The key to my survival was the testing offered by Real Time Labs. The tests confirmed a diagnosis of mycotoxicosis, which helped me understand the nature of my illness. It also helped me address the real issue and get the medical help I needed.

  • Lisa Petrison

    I became ill with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (aka Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) in 1994. By 2007, I was near-comatose all the time, with dozens of symptoms.

    Finally I learned about toxic mold and did a trial away from my home and possessions. After that, I reacted violently to both the house and its contents. The house did have black mold hidden in it.

  • Kelly Connor

    After 10 years of CFS/CFIDS, I began to remember mold exposures from the time before I got suddenly and increasingly ill in middle age. I realized that I had been having a Stachybotrys toxin reaction. As I remembered mold in various former dwellings, I began to get rid of possessions from those times. Gradually, I gave away treasured books, plants, rugs, clothes, and papers.

  • Kelly Batic Hazmat Crew

    Our family of six lost our home to toxic mold. While in the home, we lost a baby to miscarriage and had a two-year-old with asthma who was in and out of the hospital every two weeks. Other symptoms included brain fog, yeast infections, and frequent colds.

    We tested our home and found four different toxic molds. The sewer was backing up and flooding. We were unaware of the mold and bacteria growing.

  • Heather Plude

    My son went from normal kid to disabled kid in about six weeks. Starting when he was 11 and for about nine months, he was having trouble walking, playing, eating, drinking, and sleeping. He was in terrible pain and couldn't go to school.

    Our whole family was sick. Finally I read the book Surviving Mold. An ERMI test on the house came back high in toxic molds.

  • Desert View

    I had both Lyme disease (from a tick bite) and environmental illness/mold hypersensitivity.

    After losing most of my belongings and having trouble finding an apartment that I could tolerate in the humid Northeast, I decided to try what Erik Johnson had described regarding mold avoidance, and I moved to the desert.
  • Nikki Sharp's House

    Our family of five started getting sick in 2008. We finally discovered toxic mold in 2012. The entire back end of our house had to be remediated. But I didn't figure out that the illnesses and mold went hand in hand until the end of 2013.

    Our children suffered the most from food allergies and chemical sensitivities, with our youngest needing a gastronomy tube as he had given up eating. Everything made him ill.

  • Betsy Anderson's House

    I fled. We had sudden, extreme exposure when our landlord tore up floorboards, releasing a toxic mess from the crawlspace and spreading it through the house with a fan. Fled to a tent in the yard within days, then fled to hotels. Searched for a year for a safe place for my family. Ultimately, fled not only the house and all belongings, but the country (England) for a drier climate.

  • Christa Upton and Family

    "What is that smell?" I asked my friend when she visited our newly purchased 1970s house. I'd been working on getting the smell out of our carpet for three months.

    "Christa, I think it's mold."

    We ended up spraying and "killing" a massive amount of mold that was hidden under the carpet, behind baseboards, etc.

    Eight months later I was bedridden and very ill, and no one knew why.

  • Jessica Grow

    I visited a homeopathic doctor just as I was beginning to feel ill. Within 30 minutes of interviewing me, she said, "I believe you have biotoxin illness."

    Later the blood tests would confirm her diagnosis. I had become bedridden from extreme fatigue, nausea, memory loss, severe depression, body acne, and painful joints.