Is Mold Making You Sick? The Hidden Cause of Rashes, Anxiety and Fatigue

Family Life Before the Health Crisis 0:00

I'm Ashley Chakaris, and we had a deeper healing story that began with my daughter, who at the time was a senior in high school. We were normal, a normal family doing our thing. And in hindsight, things actually weren't normal. It's just I didn't have the lens to actually see. And then one day she passes out in the bathroom and a few days later is covered in rashes. Thankfully, I've been in a functional space for some time and knew better than to go the traditional route. So I actually texted Danielle over at Deeper Healing and was like, listen, something's up.

I don't know what, but something is wrong. And thus began our journey here. I remember thinking a lot, like she's just so stressed all the time, just stressed. So I would try to talk her off the ledge, so to speak. And she started manifesting actually a bunch of anxiety in hindsight.

First Warning Signs and School Collapse 0:58

When somebody would talk about anxiety, I didn't really know how to fully define that. And then at the time, she was a senior in high school, like college, all the things. So there was lot on her plate. But I started noticing her coloring, actually. Her coloring started looking grayer and grayier. I'll never forget this one night. This was definitely a pivot point for us. My husband and I were taking her out to dinner. She came out of her bedroom, and must have looked at her strangely because she asked me, what, do I not look pretty?

I said, no, you look great. You look, great, let me go grab dad. And I went and grabbed my husband and took him aside. I told him that day, something's up with her. Something is definitely up her coloring. Literally that Monday, I got a call from the school that she had passed out in the bathroom and to come get her here. She won homecoming queen on a Saturday for her school. And you fast forward just 14 days later, these rashes that are covering her face, and I'm not talking about like a little patch,

Testing, Mold Discovery, and Diagnosis 2:06

I am talking, it looked like kind of red panda bear circles on the eye. It was an unusual rash. She had been in the hospital, we rolled out appendicitis, came in, the next day we met with Jules, And Jules asked, are you fasting? She said, yes. So we said let's just run every test there is. She's very laid back, which I really appreciated during that journey because we were nervous enough. Taking on her countenance of just, hey, we're in good hands, were relaxed here, that meant a lot to me as a mom.

We got the tests back within a matter of days and it was wild to see the insane imbalances in what should have been a healthy 17-year-old kid, 18- year- old kid. One of which was her entire immune response was sideways, which usually is an indicator of mold. So when we saw that, the next step is we're going to test for mold and we are going test your house for a mold, and I mean, once you start down this rabbit hole of its own pattern of becoming, I mean, essentially a monster, because not only are you dealing with, in this case, my child, you're now dealing your home, and you are dealing, do we move out?

Do we stay? Who do hire? All the things. And it is extremely stressful on a family. Unless you've walked it, You kind of, I noticed people just shrug their shoulders at mold and they dismiss it. And mold is not taken seriously in the traditional medical model. It's not even acknowledged. And I think that is people's overall response to mold.

Home Remediation and Leaving School 3:59

They shrug it off as mildew or something when in reality it is absolutely devastating. So we began the process and I feel like our life is literally before mold was our live and then our lives is now after mold and it has completely changed the five of us forever. But honestly, forever for the better. So I'll never forget, we had them come in, the mold guys. He walked around and he was like, I think you're good. I don't see anything, but we'll see what the test says. Well, test comes back and Ava's room had quadrupled the amount of spores in her room compared to anybody else's in the rest of the house.

Okay, well now we have something going on in her room. We have an inverted floor plan. So, and I say that for a reason. That night we had a basketball game. My contractor was there, told him everything that's going. He said, I'm going to come over tomorrow, we're going cut open her ceiling in the bathroom. I was coming down the stairs and I heard him say to my husband, well, there's your problem right there. And right in the space there had been a leak in our shower and there was no sign of water anywhere.

We had zero signs of any kind of damage, nothing. Therein began the whole process of the home component. We thought we could stay there with everything that we were gonna do, which was a lot. We really thought that could live there. And long story short, what happened was, a duct got cut barely underneath the house. Because mold attaches to dust that's microscopic, it was getting filtered back into her duct system that was blowing directly into the bedroom. So she and I had to move out for a few months and she had leave school for awhile because she, not only as a teenage girl,

Recovery, Patience, and Lessons Learned 6:10

you're already super self-conscious and think of what you look like, but her rashes were so substantial and the mold had done a number on her whole energy. So I remember her iron was at three. when it should be 60 to 100. So she was literally just circling the drain and had just, you know, it's one thing on top of the other. And they'll say this at Deeper Healing because it is so true. It's never just one. You know we want it to be one, but it usually three, four things that are working synergistically together.

to essentially make the patient throw their hands up and like, what's wrong with me? And Ava slowly started getting better. But one thing that was glaring, it's really interesting with mold. First of all, many people have the respiratory issue because Avas was external. I felt like as a child, she was more apt to dealing with it. Had it been internal, I wonder really where we would be right now, frankly. So I'm grateful that it was externally, even though that hard. But because mold attacks your neurology, the anxiety and everything that I had seen at the front end of the school year, it just all started making sense.

That was another reason I took out anything that would cause her cell's anxiousness. I wanted her entire physical body to experience as much calm and peace during this as possible. And because it takes a while to pull out the mold, I knew the neurology component of that with her anxiousness, it would take time. But I could put in clean food, clean air, clear water, no EMF. I can provide an environment for her to heal. And it was very hard as a mother. And she kept saying, I'm not getting better, and that's one thing with mold.

In really any journey with health, it takes time. You have to be patient with your body. Didn't take one second to get there. It's not going to take a second and get out of there, praise God she's better. She's in college living her best life. But man, oh man. it took a minute to go there and I think as mom, We do tend to run the household, and we make the decisions for the fork and everything else that is bought. We're usually the ones doing this. So do the things to help your body to heal, is what I would say.

And educate yourself. Meet with people that have walked through it. There's such value in other people's stories. Like Danielle had showed us, this woman who came in, similar story, but different than Ava's, rashes on the face. I remember that day, she showed us this woman, then she show us what the woman looked like after, and she was healed. That day I was like, Aava is going to be fine. My daughter is gonna be okay. It's gonna take a minute to get there, I'm gonna live to tell the tale, so is she.

We have. And it's over. Thank goodness.