I have been writing this article in my mind for a few weeks now and I typically start by recording my articles podcast style and then transcribing them, but this one felt so ginormous that I’ve decided to write it first… and because I can’t handle those AI voices I will read it to you too in my own voice for those who prefer to listen.
It wasn’t until a friend’s mom received a Parkinson’s diagnosis that I felt a massive urgency flood into my body to actually get it onto the page. I’ll be honest about my first reaction. I called bullshit on that diagnosis. I have spent the past year in enough mold forums to watch Parkinson’s, MS, and other serious diagnoses completely reverse once people got out of the environment that was making them sick. That's why I finally sat myself down to write about what I learned. Not because I know better than anyone's doctor, but because I want you to trust yourself enough to keep asking questions.
I didn't plan to become someone who knows this much about mold, but sometimes life has a funny way of calling us forward to be a wayshower for others.
I have found this true after getting divorced, after leaving my Fortune 100 executive career, after starting a business, and now after this mold journey. When we go through pivotal experiences, we learn things whether we like it or not, and with that wisdom comes an opportunity to pay it forward. My hope is that if this article finds its way to you it’s supportive, hopeful and gives you a sense of not being alone.
It’s been exactly one year since my whole mold saga began… I want to walk you through it step by step, in the order it actually happened, because when I was in the thick of it I would have given anything for someone to lay it all out for me.
Here is the thing I did not expect to be writing about, but am pleasantly surprised by… this turned out to be a self-trust story.
I spend my working life helping women trust themselves. It is the whole thing I do and I feel in totally full body alignment with this work.
Yet, this year I got handed the hardest version of my own teaching, because for months my labs looked “fine” and my symptoms sounded scattered and the easiest thing in the world would have been to accept that I was just tired, just stressed, just a low hum of anxious, just a busy mom in her forties, maybe it’s just perimenopause. The only reason we got to the root was that I kept trusting myself and saying something is wrong to my doctor who was willing to keep digging with me.
More than 90% of people with mold illness are first misdiagnosed with something else, usually anxiety, depression, or chronic fatigue. Sit with that number for a second.
Nine out of ten of us get told, in one way or another, that the problem is in our heads.
If you are reading this in the part where nobody believes you yet, that number is for you.
But, before I go further, a few things.
I am not a doctor. I am not a medical professional of any kind. I am a mom who learned an enormous amount over the past year because I had to. My whole business is built around helping women trust their own intuition, so I’d ask you to do exactly that here. Feel into what’s true for you. Take what’s useful. Leave the rest.
Every mold resource I mention will be linked. I am not an affiliate for these resources. If you ever want to support my work directly, I have my Light Ride™ guided meditations here on Substack, my weekly women’s circle called Full Light, and a small number of private client spots (if you are interested, connect with me directly at katie@mysticalliving.co).
A little more housekeeping, then I promise I’ll get to the good stuff… I’ve organized this by category so you can scroll to whatever stage you’re actually in right now. If you’re still trying to figure out if you’re sick, start at the top. If you already know mold is in your home and you’re staring down remediation, jump there. If you are just sort of curious or a friend of mine feel free to skim. You do you.
Here’s the simplest explanation I can give you if this is all new. Certain molds produce toxins. Most people breathe them in and their bodies clear them out without any drama. Some of us can’t. Our immune systems switch on to fight, and then never switch back off, and that permanently activated inflammation starts causing problems everywhere at once. That’s why the symptom list looks so scattered and unrelated that no one takes you seriously, including sometimes yourself.
And one more thing worth knowing before we start if you are a pretty healthy person landing here… there may be absolutely no need for you to go down this mold rabbit hole. Roughly 25% of the population carries a genetic susceptibility that makes it hard for their bodies to clear these toxins. The other 75% can walk through the same water damaged building and be fine. That’s why one family gets devastated and the neighbors never notice a thing. Through testing, we learned our family is in that 25%. It means this is something we’ll carry awareness of for the rest of our lives. I want my kids informed and educated about it. I do not want them to be paranoid. Ok I think we’re ready for the story… here we glow.
SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT
It was August of 2025. One year ago. I knew something was not right in my body.
I couldn’t lose weight no matter what I did and I know that is a little vain, but it was an early warning clue. I was brain foggy, I felt hazy and honestly just less smart. I was losing my usually thick healthy hair, also a little vain, but it was really rattling me! Chronic neck, shoulder, clavicle pain prevented me from pursuing many of my favorite activities. New psoriasis spots popping up daily… that was fun. I could not regulate my body temperature. My usual motivation, the thing I’ve always been able to count on in myself (I’m a generator in human design… it’s like the energizer bunny archeytype), just wasn’t there. My kiddos and I were getting sick constantly. Anything that came through the house, we all got, and it would hang on for weeks at a time. Not a normal cold cycle… out of school 2 weeks and down for the count for a cold!
I went to my doctor.
All the traditional blood tests came back “fine”.
Yup, totally “fine”, no clues. Thyroid, hormones… all the buzzy things looked good.
Luckily, I have a doctor who knows me. I have been with my family doctor for almost a decade, and there is real value in that kind of relationship. He knows my baseline. He knows I’m not someone who imagines symptoms. He didn’t flinch when I kept pushing him. I kept saying, we have to keep digging, something is wrong. He listened.
Somewhere in all of this he wrote me a note that I have thought about probably 10 times since. He said, “you sure are in tune with your body”.
Yes I am… I’ve been honing my self trust muscles!
I know how rare that exchange is. Women get told it’s hormones. It’s stress. It’s motherhood. It’s your age. There’s a name for it now, medical gaslighting, and I hear versions of it far to often from women I work with. If your doctor is not curious about you, that is information about your doctor, not about your body.
Please keep pushing. You are the only one who lives in your body. Trust your inner knowing.
So, one day I was sitting in his office and he said, Katie, I think we need to run the CIRS panel.
CIRS stands for chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And the minute he said it, something clicked in my whole body.
Oh my Goddess.
Fuuuuuuucckkkk.
Maybe it’s CIRS… again.
Because this was not my first time. I had been diagnosed with CIRS about eight years earlier, done the Shoemaker protocol, remediated my house for mold, and thought all of it was firmly in my past. We’ll get into what all this means as we go.
First, I want to sit here for a second, because if you are getting this diagnosis right now, I know exactly what that room feels like.
The relief and the dread arrive at the exact same moment.
Relief, because someone finally has a name for it. You are not imagining this. You are not crazy. It is not that you are simply tired or overwhelmed with the parenting juggle or bad at handling stress. Something real is happening in your body and it has a name and there are tests for it.
Dread, because I already knew what was on the other side of that name. I knew about the testing and the cost and the displacement. I knew this was going to take over our lives. Part of me wanted to argue with him.
Not this again. We already did this.
We ran a series of blood tests. The markers were startling. Every one of my inflammatory markers was activated.
If you want to ask your own doctor about this, the markers commonly used in the Shoemaker Protocol are C4a, TGF-beta 1, MMP-9, MSH, VIP, VEGF, ADH and osmolality, along with HLA-DR genetic testing to see whether you carry the susceptibility.
In the simplest terms I can offer as a non-doctor: several of these measure inflammation that has been switched on and never switched back off. Others measure hormones and regulatory signals that get suppressed when your body has been fighting for too long. MSH is one of the big ones, and when it’s low, it affects sleep, mood, weight, hormones, gut function, and pain regulation all at once, (good times!) which is part of why this illness makes people feel like everything is broken simultaneously. HLA-DR is the genetic piece, telling you whether you’re in the group that can’t clear these toxins efficiently.
Standard bloodwork includes none of this, which is exactly why so many of us get told everything looks “fine”.
At the same time, I ran the visual contrast sensitivity test, the VCS, on myself and my whole family. I recommend this as a starting point for anyone who suspects something. It’s around fifteen dollars, you can do it online, and it measures your ability to distinguish contrast, which gets impaired by biotoxin exposure. It is not a diagnosis, but it tells you where to look. It’s also a helpful way to track your healing progress too.
Only one person in my entire family passed it.
That was one of the hardest moments of the whole year for me.
Watching my kids be sick was the part I could not make peace with. They were catching everything, staying sick for weeks, dragging through days they should have been running through. My children were not operating at a hundred percent and they had no idea why, and neither did I, and I am their mom and I could not fix it quickly.
We tested the kids with bloodwork too. And then my doctor said the sentence that changed the next year of my life.
Katie, it’s time to test the house.
Fuuuuuuucckkkk.
TESTING THE HOUSE
Just like my initial bloodwork, my house “appeared” clean, not a single sign of visible mold… but it was time to dig deeper.
We started with the HERTSMI and the ERMI. Both are dust tests you can order and do yourself. The ERMI looks at thirty-six different mold species and gives you an overall score for your home. The HERTSMI is the shorter version, looking at the five molds most associated with making people sick. You literally walk around your house with a Swiffer cloth collecting dust, then mail it in. Simple, relatively inexpensive, and a solid first step.
The results came back & were alarming.
Again, there was no visible mold anywhere in my house. None. And I had always taken water events seriously and stayed on top of anything I noticed, due to having dealt with this exact situation previously. If you take one thing from this section, let it be that you cannot always see what makes you sick.
Every water event deserves your FULL attention.
The dust tests told us something was there. The next step was hiring an inspector.
I chose to go with what I considered the best of the best, because I wanted this done right. I hired Safe Start Environmental out of Illinois. They flew in, and their inspector spent an entire day in my house.
He came back with a hundred-page report.
When you are sick and overwhelmed and foggy, a hundred-page report is a brutal thing to receive. If that’s where you are right now, I want to say gently: one day at a time. One page at a time. You do not have to understand all of it today.
The report showed water issues in every single one of our bathrooms, basement, family room and flagged that we needed to explore further.
FINDING SUPPORT
Around this time I joined my first CIRS community, the Biotoxin Lady’s community, run by a woman named Lauren… a true earth angel.
This was one of the most helpful things I did in the entire process. Inside her community you can ask questions and get quick answers, and I was able to meet with Lauren directly. She’s another mom who went through this herself and built an entire business around helping people navigate it. That’s not something I plan to do, but I have deep respect for her and what she’s built.
Being able to ask questions of people further down the road than me, about special diets, about home inspectors, about remediation companies, made an enormous difference when I was too foggy to research everything myself. It’s also where I found my remediation company. Before we get to remediating we first had to…
SHED THE SHIT
“Shed the Shit” is a mantra I’m known for, and something I often share in my membership. Our internal and external realities mirror each other. When things feel stuffed and sticky on the inside, one of the fastest ways to shift your state is to clean up what’s around you.
I did not expect to live that teaching quite this literally.
We had to get rid of almost everything.
Porous materials hold biotoxins.
Upholstery, mattresses, fabric, even paper, anything soft and absorbent that lived in a contaminated environment carry biotoxins. We found creative solutions to items that we wanted to save, like taking all the kids’ art work and creating a decoupaged masterpiece! We had fun with it as we sat on the floor with all the art spread around us, gluing down finger paintings and third grade self portraits and it is now one of my favorite things in this house and can be easily cleaned.
For everything else we got a dumpster. Anything exposed and porous went into it. We live close to our town recycling center, so nonporous items that were salvageable went there, and we made a big donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters with what could be given a second life. Our dumpster had a resident skeleton named Bobby, because you really need a little humor when you are shedding the shit. There was also shame that moved through me at what we had accumulated and sadness of those versions of life disappearing… many of my finds from expat life in Europe were ready to be released… it was cleansing too. Cathartic.
I snapped photos of photos I wanted to save, like this vintage car that buzzed me through Umbria. I savored every page of a very detailed journal I uncovered from a summer I lived in Paris as a teen — that couldn’t possibly be disposed, so it is safely in a plastic bin to be tended to in time. I made the best choices I could and frankly much of this stuff was my accumulation and mine to tend to. Thankfully for Steve and the boys I had lots of muscles to help get things out.
Being now a year out… there is not one single thing I miss.
Not one. I have thought about it, and I cannot name a single object I grieve.
Which tells me something about how much of what we hold onto is weight rather than value.
If you’re staring down your own version of this, look up a list of what needs to go after mold exposure, because the categories are fairly well established and it helps to have something outside your own foggy brain making the call. Take it item by item rather than room by room. And know that whatever grief comes up isn’t really about the couch.
REMEDIATION (aka get rid of the mold)
I chose Better Breathing Environmental, recommended through Lauren’s community. I am based outside of Boston and this is a local company to me.
Something worth knowing before you hire anyone: you want a certified Indoor Environmental Professional, an IEP, not a general contractor who says they do mold. This is very important. There’s a Shoemaker-endorsed remediation standard specifically for medically sensitive situations, and it is very different from cosmetic mold removal. This is exactly why I went with Safe Start for inspection and Better Breathing for remediation, both of whom work to that level.
This matters enormously: true remediation is removal, not killing. Bleach is not remediation. Fogging is not remediation. Kilz and chemical treatments are not remediation. If someone proposes spraying something to kill the mold and calling it done, that is not what you need. The mold particles themselves make you sick whether they’re alive or dead. They have to be physically removed from your home. We physically removed everything that was moldy.
Right as remediation began, we had to move out of the house. We thought we’d be gone 3 weeks, maybe 6 at the most.
It was 5 months.
The crew started with the bathrooms, since those were the flagged areas. What they found behind the walls was MAJOR black mold. Hiding behind every single bathroom wall in the house.
They would send me photos like these and I would just stare at them.
Fuuuuuuucckkkk.
We ended up having to gut every single bathroom in the house. And in the process we learned something else. Our original builder had cut a tremendous number of corners. We had to replace every single piece of plumbing in the house, because incredibly cheap plumbing had been used everywhere it couldn’t be seen, and beautiful copper wherever it could. Our home was only eight years old.
If I were ever buying a home again, I would do the inspection completely differently. I would bring in someone who checks moisture in the walls and does not just walk through looking at surfaces. I would not be afraid to be the person asking for more.
THE RENTAL (was very cute, but very moldy!)
Ugh, I did exactly what you are not supposed to do. I did not test the rental for mold.
I just couldn’t at the time. I told myself it was going to be “fine”. I asked the homeowner if there had been any mold issues, I thought that was enough due diligence (fast forward and we learned they were not transparent with us). How could the rental possibly have a mold issue too. I wanted to be blissfully unaware.
I don’t think people talk enough about what displacement does to a family.
5 of us humans plus 2 German Shepherds.
You are not on vacation.
You are living out of a house that isn’t yours, without your things, without your rhythms, with your kids sleeping in unfamiliar rooms, with new neighbors, while somewhere across town your actual home is being torn open. Every single thing takes more effort, the school commutes elongated. Where are the scissors. Where is the good pan. Everyone is a little off and nobody can say exactly why.
There were nights I just cried from the pure overwhelm of it. I remember genuinely believing we were never going to get to the other side of this. It is easy to look back now, feeling better, sitting in my own breathing house (we’ll get to that, but yes houses need to breathe like people!), and narrate it like a story with an ending. In the middle of it there was no ending in sight. There was just another test, another estimate, another delay, and a body that wasn’t working.
A couple months into the rental, I started to feel a little better because we began to detox our bodies, but nowhere near where I should have been. We retested our bloodwork and things simply were not improving the way my doctor expected. And once again he said it.
Katie, I think you need to test the rental.
Well, don’t you know it.
The rental came back even more moldy than our actual house. Different molds, but worse.
Fuuuuuuucckkkk.
I give myself grace on this one. I know I should have tested it immediately, and I let hope override what I knew. Lesson learned, and it did delay our healing timeline.
So now we needed out of the rental, our house wasn’t ready, and I was too paranoid to move into another rental and roll the dice a third time. Did I mention the biotoxins make you feel a little crazy!
I talked to my earth angle contractor Hans and asked how we could possibly move back in. By that point I actually believed my house was safer than anywhere else we could go, because it had been fully remediated. Construction was still happening around us. It wasn’t ideal. It was the best available option. I trusted myself and we prepared to move home.
BUT FIRST… SMALL PARTICLE CLEANING, THE STEP NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT
If you take one practical thing from this entire article, outside of trusting yourself, please let it be this one.
After remediation is complete, your home needs what’s called small particle cleaning. Remediation removes the moldy materials. Small particle cleaning removes the invisible toxic dust that remediation leaves behind, settled on every surface in your house. That dust is what keeps making you sick after you thought you were done.
The process is meticulous. HEPA vacuum, wet wipe with a damp microfiber cloth, then HEPA vacuum again. Every surface. It takes hours per room.
Most remediation companies skip it, because it’s labor intensive and expensive. You have to ask for it specifically, and you should get it in your contract as its own line item. Multiple CIRS practitioners will tell you that recovery can fail entirely without it, and I believe them.
We had ours done through Better Breathing Environmental after the remediation was complete.
I also clean my home very differently now, permanently. Here is exactly what we use.
The whole philosophy is simple: no bleach, no Lysol, no Febreze, no Windex, no synthetic fragrance, nothing that adds a chemical burden to a house we just worked this hard to clear. And a real HEPA vacuum, which matters more than almost anything else.
Floors. Bona Free and Simple for hardwood, with a hardwood-specific mop. Bona Multi-Surface for tile and concrete, with its own separate mop. Damp, never wet, and never mix the mops between surfaces.
Vacuum. A C3 Calima Miele, with the brush attachment used on air vents too, which people forget entirely.
Bathrooms. Branch Basics with Oxygen Boost for tile, grout, and toilets. Spray, wait five minutes, scrub, rinse well. Seventh Generation glass cleaner and a squeegee for shower glass. And a daily shower spray after every single shower, sprayed on and left to sit, never rinsed. That one habit alone prevents a lot.
Sinks. Branch Basics to scrub, then white vinegar poured into the overflow hole at the top of the sink, ten minutes, then flush with hot water. That hole is a place mold loves and nobody thinks about.
Kitchen. Branch Basics on countertops. A non-toxic degreaser for the stovetop, on a cooled stove. Microfiber cloths for everything, laundered after every use.
Periodic. A free-and-clear CLR product for hard water on glass, but only when the glass actually looks cloudy, not routinely.
Filters. Air Oasis, every room.
I made a one-page guide for our house so there’s no guessing and no substituting.
POST TESTING, AND WHY YOU DO NOT SKIP IT
Before we moved back in, we did post testing, and I want to make this its own point because people skip it.
Have someone different from your remediation company do your post testing. Different eyes, different incentives.
Timing matters here too. You wait roughly four weeks after remediation before you retest, so dust has time to re-accumulate. Test too soon and you can get a falsely clean result. We waited about four weeks after small partical cleaning.
I used Madeline Flagg of Purely Green Environmental for ours. She founded the company back in 2002, has a chemistry degree from Boston University and research background at Harvard Medical School, and holds NORMI and ACAC certifications. She came in and ran a full battery of tests to confirm we had actually gotten all the mold and that the air was clean.
She found an area that had been missed in the original inspection.
We remediated that too. If I had skipped this step, we would have moved back into a house with mold still in it, believing we were done.
For anyone tracking numbers: Shoemaker’s guidance is that people with CIRS need an ERMI score under 2 to actually recover and get their MSH moving in the right direction, we currently have MSH ranging from 10-27 in our family… we are working towards 40+. I have not run a new ERMI yet. Once our construction is finally finished, I will.
In an ideal situation you’d wait until construction was 100% complete before moving in, but in many cases things aren’t ideal, so do the best you can.
THE HOUSE THAT COULDN’T BREATHE
We finally moved back in during the summer.
The humidity in the house was 77%. Alarm bells!
Mold grows above 60%. I was terrified. We had five dehumidifiers two of which were serious Sante Fe’s running around the clock and we could not get the humidity below the sixties.
We knew we’d had poor construction, but this was something deeper, and I needed the root cause, not another workaround.
Through my partner, we found an expert, John who came and walked the entire house with us. When we got to the attic, he stopped and said, okay, I know what’s going on.
You have what we call in the industry a “sick house”. Your house can’t breathe.
My home had been sold to me as extremely energy efficient, built fully to Massachusetts code. The entire attic was covered in spray foam. Every bit of it.
I joked with him that it was like my house was wearing a mask.
He said, yes. That’s exactly right. Your house cannot breathe.
I have thought about that a lot since. I walked away from my Fortune 100 career because my company wanted to put something into my body that I had not consented to and to not only mask me physically, but to mask my inner knowing and values. And then I came home and got sick because someone had sealed my house shut in the name of following code. Same story, twice. Something applied over a living thing, for its own good, that stopped it from breathing.
I asked what we do about it. He said we remove the spray foam. And then he said the thing that made the decision for me: if you don’t, you’ll be in this exact same situation in a couple of years. You will absolutely grow mold again.
Holy fuuuuuuucckkkk.
Just as I thought we were reaching the end of this project, we were starting a new one.
BREAKING CODE ON PURPOSE
My contractor brought in a crew, and this is where we broke code. We chose what we knew was right for our home over what the building codes enforce.
I don’t want to go full conspiracy theory here, though anyone who knows me knows I love a good rabbit hole. But I am genuinely concerned that current building codes are making homes so tight that they are making people sick. That’s a conversation for another day.
The spray foam removal was a gnarly, gnarly job. Ninety degrees outside every day the team worked, dehumidifiers still running throughout the house. I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies, ice creams, popsicles, and lunches for the crew. It became the small thing I could actually do. I could make cookies. So I made a lot of cookies. The crew worked in my attic in a heat wave pulling out truckloads of foam and I fed them like it was my job!
Almost immediately, we could see it working. Where the spray foam came off, the roof deck underneath was completely wet. All that trapped moisture finally releasing.
We were also tracking CO2, which had been sitting well over a thousand (this is bad). More evidence the house wasn’t getting fresh air. And yes, for anyone in the know, we had an ERV, which is required in a tight home to bring fresh air in. It wasn’t doing the job. Could we have added more equipment, more contraptions, more systems to compensate? Sure. But I wanted to solve it at the root.
My house needed to breathe.
As the foam came out, the humidity dropped and the CO2 started to normalize. I track both with a device from AirThings, which I’d recommend to anyone. It measures humidity, CO2, radon and more.
We also added gable vents to let the house breathe, and I chose mine in an octagon shape. That was a feng shui decision. The octagon is seen as a symbol of protection to ward off negative energy and as a vehicle for the advent of good health and good fortune. Yes please! If I was going to cut new openings into my home to let it breathe again, I wanted them to carry intention rather than just function.
Intentionality has been true of the whole rebuild. Every choice we’ve made putting this house back together has been a conscious one down to the energy of the paint colors, in a way it never would have been if none of this had happened. Probably a share for another day, but as part of this process I removed WiFi from my home! I also way upgraded my water with a whole home water filter the AquaOx XL and the Cloud Reverse Osmosis system… these are the things that turn me. Keeping my family toxin free is what I find super sexy these days!
THE SHOEMAKER PROTOCOL
While the house was healing, so were we. Parallel paths… you genuinely cannot do one without the other. The cleanest protocol in the world will not hold if the walls around you can’t breathe, and a beautifully renovated house won’t help if your body hasn’t caught up.
The Shoemaker protocol was developed by Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker, a physician who pioneered much of the research and treatment around biotoxin illness and CIRS. It’s the protocol I used eight years ago the first time, and I knew from experience that it worked for me.
The first rule and step 1 of 12 of Shoemaker is that you have to be out of the moldy environment before you can begin. So we started step 2 once we were in the rental (back when we thought it was mold free, whoops!), beginning with a heavy-duty binder called CSM. A binder does exactly what it sounds like. It grabs the toxins in your gut and carries them out of you, instead of letting them get reabsorbed and recirculated over and over. That’s the whole first move. Stop the loop.
We are still working our way through it. Right now we’re focused on eradicating MARCoNS, a resistant staph colonization that can live way up in your sinuses and quietly keep your inflammation switched on no matter what else you do. Seems wild that we are only on step 3, but I truly believe the first 3 steps are the gnarliest and take the longest. My last rodeo with CIRS my life completely changed after VIP (step 12) … it’s like the holy grail of healing! Do not skip step 12!
The protocol itself is well documented and easy to find online, so I won’t reproduce it here, I do think this guide from Surviving Mold is helpful. What I’ll say is that the sequence matters, the order is not arbitrary, and doing it with a practitioner who actually knows the protocol makes an enormous difference.
What strikes me looking back is how similar the two paths were. With my body, we had to stop treating symptoms and find the source. With my house, we had to stop chasing humidity with dehumidifiers and find out why it couldn’t breathe. Both times, what finally worked was going to the root instead of managing the surface. I have spent years teaching women to do exactly this, to stop managing the feeling and go find what’s underneath it. This year I got to practice it on my own drywall!
DIET, SUPPLEMENTS, ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS…
I explored a lot here, and I want to be honest that this is the area where I think you have to find your own way.
I did stints following Nutrition with Judy and her carnivore protocols. We found that too strict for our family long term, and I still think she has a tremendous amount of excellent free material. Her podcast and website are worth your time.
Where we’ve landed, and what’s genuinely working for us right now, is gluten free, low amylose, organic whole foods. Simple, not extreme, sustainable for a family with kids. I live near the best USDA certified organic farm Volantes and do 90% of my shopping there.
On supplements, we all take various different ones depending on our unique needs, and we’re using Formula 1 NSB for our MARCoNS treatment after BEG did not work for us. I’m not going to write out our full supplement stack here because it’s individual and it changes, but I’m genuinely happy to answer questions in the comments if something specific would help you.
One thing I will tell you about, because it’s been one of my favorite pieces of this whole process, is HTMA. Hair tissue mineral analysis. You trim a little bit of your hair, send it in, and it maps your mineral levels and what you’re actually deficient in. I do mine through Dr. Heather Finley and her team. If it speaks to you, I am sharing an affiliate link here, so you can use my code: FRIEND
Two things I love about it. First, it’s specific to me, not a generic protocol.
What comes back is a supplement blend formulated for what my body actually needs. Second, it comes as a powder, which matters a lot to me. I do not love swallowing a fistful of capsules every day, and this way I’m getting what I need without that extra capsule.
The best part came six months in, when I did my second HTMA. Things are still not exactly where I want them, but we could see real, measurable progress from the first test to the second! You get a full hour deep dive with Heather’s team on your results.
Healing from CIRS is slow and it is mostly invisible from the inside. You do not wake up one morning “fixed”. Having something that shows you moving in the right direction, even a little, even when you still feel like garbage, is genuinely sustaining. Find your version of that. Whatever gives you evidence. Some people find tracking with a mood journal helpful. Also the VCS is a great way to see progress too.
I do envision a time when we can come off of most of these supplements. Right now, our bodies need the extra support to do the work of healing, and I’m at peace with that.
Many alternatives were tried, I’m pretty willing to try anything… red light (we have a Sauna Space), Ampcoil for PEMF, Lumiceuticals, Hockett for oxygen and ozone therapies(left me with full body hives for a week!), craniosacral, altlas orthogonal chiropractic, brain health explorations…
INSURANCE
I don’t think enough people know to fight here, so I want to spend time on it.
I’ve found that having a good broker is the single most important variable here, someone who will fight for you!
Early on it became clear my original broker was not going to advocate for me. Mold coverage is capped at ten thousand dollars in my state. That was the whole conversation with her full stop, end of story. Another conspiracy theory in the making on the cap of $10k!
I switched brokers at the very beginning of this process, and I worked with a gentleman named Dylan who was a lifesaver through the entire thing. We talked on the phone multiple times a week. Not once a month. Multiple times a week, for a year.
Here is the argument you need with insurance and Dylan is the one who kept making it: water causes mold. Mold does not simply appear on its own. Which means the right claim is a water damage claim, not a mold claim, and those are governed by entirely different limits.
We are still mid negotiation, so I’m not going to get into specifics publicly, though I’m happy to talk privately if you’re facing this. My corporate background taught me not to get walked over, and I brought that energy here. Insurance is a relationship-based industry, and you want someone in it who will genuinely go after it for you and stay your partner the whole way.
I’m happy to share Dylan’s contact details if you want them. My phone just buzzed while I was writing this paragraph. It’s Dylan. Still on it, a year later.
TELLING PEOPLE
This part surprised me with how much it mattered.
CIRS is genuinely hard for people to comprehend. There’s no cast, no scan, no obvious wound, and the whole thing sounds a little unbelievable to anyone who hasn’t lived it. So I wrote a document explaining what was happening, what CIRS actually is, and how each person in our family was affected, and I shared it with our loved ones.
It was one of the more useful things I did. People want to help you, people want to understand. Most of the time they just don’t know what they’re helping with. Handing them one clear page did more for us than a hundred half explanations.
With the kids, I took the same approach. We talked with their teachers so school had some context for what was going on at home. And we educated the kids themselves, in age-appropriate terms, on what this is and why our family is affected when other families aren’t.
I want my children to grow up knowing they carry this susceptibility, knowing what to look for, and knowing how to advocate for themselves in a doctor’s office someday. Informed. Educated. Not afraid of their own house.
THE PEOPLE WHO CARRIED US
I could not have done this alone.
Steve was grounded and steady through the entire thing, and he was physically impacted by all of it too. That’s what makes it remarkable to me. He was sick himself and still somehow the calm in the room. Knowing I wasn’t in this by myself, and knowing I could completely fall apart in front of him without him flinching, is a large part of why I made it through with smiles.
There’s something else I noticed this year that I did not expect. So many men showed up in their full masculine presence. Steve, and my contractor Hans, my doctor, Dylan, Dennis and his remediation crew, the inspectors, and the people who just kept moving things forward when I had nothing left to move them with. There was a healing in that for me, honestly. Having good men in your life who simply take the next step, who don’t need to be managed or convinced, who look at your situation and say I’ve got this part.
My family was incredibly supportive throughout. Showing up with the binders, the nasal spray, the supplements… it’s a bit of a production and they rolled with it all, offering constant love and support.
And the communities I was part of, Lauren’s, and my own membership circle, gave me windows every week where I got to be myself again instead of a woman managing a constant crisis.
That’s what I’d tell you if you’re in this. Let people carry pieces of it. Tell them what’s actually happening. You do not have to hold all of it in your own two hands.
WHAT HELD ME THROUGH IT
I want to talk about the thing that held me steady through all of this, because it isn’t a product or a protocol.
I have a guided meditation practice I created called the Light Ride™. Through this year, when I was too foggy to think clearly, too tired to plan, and too overwhelmed to make one more decision, listening to my own pre-recorded Light Ride’s™ was the thing that kept giving me access to myself. It’s very hard to hear your own knowing when your body is inflamed and your house is being torn apart and you’re living in a strangers home and someone is sending you photographs of black mold behind your children’s bathroom walls.
Meditation didn’t cure my CIRS – what it did was keep me in relationship with myself while my body and my home were both being rebuilt.
I kept running my weekly Full Light circle through the entire thing, and that consistency turned out to be its own medicine. Showing up in community every week, when everything else in my life was uncertain, gave me a rhythm to hold onto.
Friends who were in the thick of it with me, I happen to have 2 beautiful friends going through CIRS/remediation right along side me and then my healthy friends who would listen or do ceremony and help transmute the mold. My friendships deepened in this season, as I had less energy to give and saved it for those that had the capacity to go deep into this portal with me. Now that I’m feeling myself again, I have more capacity to reengage with live and friendships and host people — this reemergence feels really good!
If you’re in this right now and your nervous system is fried, I’m not going to tell you to meditate your way out of a biotoxin illness. I will say that having ten to twenty minutes a day that belonged only to me, where nobody needed anything and no decision had to be made, was one of the few things I had complete control over during a year when I controlled almost nothing. If the Light Ride™ speaks to you, check it out here. If meditation doesn’t speak to you, my friend Sarah Tacy has a nervous system repatterning program that you may find supportive. Find something for you.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
My house is breathing!
And we are starting to breathe better too.
Everyone in my family feels tremendously better. We still have a ways to go on the protocol, and I’m not going to pretend we’re at the finish line. But my creativity is coming back online, which is personally very exciting to me. I want to move my body again. I want to walk and be in nature. I have the energy to write this article, which a year ago I absolutely did not.
A little context for those that don’t know me, I’m an entrepreneur, I work for myself, and that meant I could quiet my business down while we went through this. I kept running my weekly Full Light membership circle the entire time, and that consistency was genuinely beautiful to have. I kept working with my private clients. And I stopped all marketing & social media completely during this period, and I feel no pull to go back to any of it. I didn’t even send an email to my list for a year! That’s probably its own article. Landing here on Substack, in a place where people go deeper than a five second reel, has felt like the right place for me to reemerge gently.
I had the resources to do this the way I did. Investing in a healthy home and healthy bodies became the number one place I put my money this past year. Not everyone is in that position, and there are creative solutions at every level. That’s exactly why I’m putting all of this out here for free.
If you’re in the thick of it right now, sick and foggy and overwhelmed and staring at a report you can’t process: there is light at the end of this tunnel. I promise you.
My house is breathing. No fuuuuuuucckkkk required.
You will get there too.
WHERE THIS IS ALL HEADED
Here is a number that stopped me cold when I found it. The EPA estimates that up to half of U.S. buildings have water damage capable of harboring mold. Half.
As someone who spent a career studying trends in my corporate America life, and who has become one once or twice myself, I believe this is going to be one of the bigger stories of the coming years. As building codes push homes toward greater and greater efficiency, those homes breathe less.
Less breathing means more sickness.
More sickness means more dependence on pharmaceuticals.
I don’t think this conversation is going away.
I think it’s just getting started.
There’s a passage in Leviticus, chapter 14, describing a priest inspecting a house for contamination in the walls. If it’s found, the affected stones are torn out. If it returns after the walls are scraped and replastered, the entire house must be torn down, because it’s considered unclean and unfit to live in.
This is not a new problem. People have been contending with sick houses for thousands of years. But it is a problem that will grow if we continue down a path where we are restricting our homes of breath.
EARTH ANGELS
A small handful of people became what I think of as earth angels this year. People I trust completely, and will keep sending others to.
My family doctor, who kept digging with me. Lauren, the Biotoxin Lady, and her community. Safe Start Environmental in Illinois. Better Breathing Environmental. Madeline Flagg at Purely Green Environmental, for post testing. John, who found the mask on my house. My contractor Hans and his crew. And Dylan, my insurance broker.
Every one of them has been linked throughout this article.
WHY I’M SHARING ALL OF THIS…
I’ve noticed a pattern in my life. After my divorce, other women going through divorce found their way to me, sometimes for one conversation, sometimes it became a friendship. After I left corporate, women who wanted to leave corporate found me too, and some became clients. Now with mold, the same thing keeps happening. My remediation company regularly asks if I’ll talk to this person or that person, and I always say yes.
I believe everything is working out for me, even in the gnarliest seasons.
And I believe that to whom much is given, much is expected.
So here is everything I learned, in one place, instead of one conversation at a time. I may write the divorce version and the leaving corporate version one of these days too.
I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge this year, and I want to be clear that I am not going to build a business on it. This is not my life’s work. What lights me up is supporting women to trust themselves, and that’s what I’ll keep doing.
Which is maybe why this year hit the way it did. Every single turn in this story came down to the same thing. Believing myself when the bloodwork said fine. Pushing when it would have been easier to accept the answer. Testing the rental when I did not want to know. Asking why the house was humid instead of buying a sixth dehumidifier. Not one of those was a medical decision.
They were all self-trust decisions, and I only made them because I have spent years building my self-trust muscles on smaller things.
That is the actual reason I do the work I do. Not so women feel good, although that is an epic bonus! I do it so that when the moment comes and something in you says something is wrong here or really right, you already know how to listen, and you already know how to act on it! Taking action on our intuition is a big part of this magic.
This mold information is simply something I learned, and something I can share with you.
There are a lot of people profiting in this space, and I think it matters that we trust our own inner compass and do what’s right for our own families. I’m not a mold expert. I’m a mom who got sick, whose kids got sick, and who questions everything, because questioning everything and getting to the root of what’s true has always been a core value in my family.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten things. I tried to capture the biggest pieces, in the order they happened although there was a lot of parallel pathing, organized so you can find what you need. If you get a heart ping to send this to someone who’s going through something like it, please do. That’s exactly what it’s for.
Any questions, please add them to the comments and I’ll respond to everyone.
Take what’s for you here, and leave the rest.
& remember to trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.
xo,
Katie Sol 💖