How I Found Out Mold Was Making Me Sick
Key takeaways:
Juliet Davis thought she had long COVID symptoms and was even taking part in a long COVID study.
She was shocked to learn her symptoms were not from COVID but from mold in her home.
She suggests those with long COVID symptoms consider whether there may be an environmental cause, such as mold exposure.
Juliet Davis had COVID-19 in December 2021 and still had troubling symptoms weeks later. She was taking part in a Mount Sinai study on long COVID when she learned — to her astonishment — that her debilitating symptoms were not from COVID at all.
They were the result of mold in her home.
Looking back, she says she already had some of the symptoms before. But they became much worse when she got COVID.
“I just stayed sick a long time. It was fatigue and brain fog that lasted 6 weeks. And then when I thought it was all the way better, I started having really weird POTS-type symptoms — dizziness and heart palpitations,” she says, describing postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It’s associated with a rapid rise in heart rate and feeling dizzy.
Search and compare options
What bothered her the most was that she often felt too hot or too cold. She also started gaining weight “uncontrollably” and had a lot of stomach pain.
It was almost a year before she talked to a doctor about her symptoms. She started with the cardiologist she’d seen before when she had some abnormalities in her coronary arteries as a result of a childhood illness.
Juliet suggested her symptoms sounded like long COVID, and the cardiologist agreed. He suggested she see her primary care physician (PCP) and consider joining Mount Sinai’s long COVID study.
Her PCP sent her to a gastroenterologist, who diagnosed her with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and a rheumatologist, who diagnosed her with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Doctors don’t always think of mold toxicity
It wasn’t until Juliet decided to also see a functional medicine doctor that someone suggested testing for mold.
At first, she dismissed the idea, as she describes in a TikTok video where she talks about being a 40-year-old housewife and mother of four in Brooklyn.
“I grew up in houses that had mold, and that seemed normal to me,” Juliet says. “You scrub mold out of the shower every once in a while.”
Read more like this
Explore these related articles, suggested for readers like you.
Her house, she thought, couldn’t have a significant mold problem because they’d extensively renovated it 7 years before. “Everything was fresh. It was a gut reno. We thought we did everything right.”
But when she thought about it more, she realized she did struggle to clean mold out of the shower. Once, she remembered, a mushroom had grown in the corner of the shower.
“It turned out my shower was very, very, very moldy,” Juliet says. “There were extremely toxic levels of mold. It was probably a more extreme situation than I grew up with.”
Her doctor ran some tests and explained that mold toxicity is bioaccumulative, meaning exposure builds up over time.
“You can tolerate the mold toxin to a certain point, and then your body is like, nope, that’s enough,” Juliet says. “That's when I started having symptoms because it's like the system is constantly inflamed and freaking out.”
Once she realized the problem, she had the shower removed and replaced. She called the contractor that had originally renovated the house, and he found that water was getting behind the shower. The shower pan was full of mud and even had a giant mushroom growing in it.
Mold remediation is critical
In retrospect, Juliet says, she should have called a mold remediation company first and then had the shower replaced.
“The contractor’s guys just spread mycotoxins and mold spores all throughout my house,” she says. She felt a lot worse at that point.
When she finally called in a mold remediation company, they showed up in protective gear. They brought air scrubbers that pulled everything out of the air while they thoroughly cleaned the house. At the same time, they brought in air duct cleaners, who cleaned the ducts and dryer vent.
Carpet experts came in as well. “Carpet people came and took all the area carpets away. And then they in-home cleaned the mattresses, the carpets, the couches, the runners. My daughter has a giant unicorn stuffie, and they cleaned that. And then at the end (this is the sad part for me), they had me throw away the vast majority of my house plants.”
The joy of clean air
A month later, though, the mold remediation crew returned to retest Juliet’s home’s air quality. The results were excellent. “My air came back cleaner than outdoors.”
Now, she says she believes her home to be safe from mold. She runs air purifiers and dehumidifiers all through the house to keep things dry and the air clean.
There are other places, though, that she can’t go in because of mold. “I can’t go to the basement of my kids’ school, and I can’t go in the subway anymore. I rode the subway, and I saw black mold down there. I get a bad stomach ache the next morning after I breathe mold.”
She was the only one in her family to experience symptoms from the mold exposure and says she’s grateful her husband and children didn’t get sick from it, too.
“It was really, really difficult,” she says. Other people with similar symptoms, she says, should consider if there might be an environmental cause. “I think if people have long COVID and their symptoms match up with the mold toxicity symptoms, they should check their bathrooms and their air ducts and any place that has water in their house.”
It would have helped her save time and money, she says. “I’ve probably spent about $50,000 on this so far when you count the doctors, the supplements, the medications, the shower removal and replacement, and the mold remediation. And there wasn’t any insurance covering any portion of that.”
She’s fortunate, she says, that she can afford to spend that money on her healthcare and to remediate the mold. She feels bad for people who cannot.
She says she feels 70% better now and hopes she will continue to improve.
A big regret, though, is that her young children don’t know the person she was before it all happened. “I was one of the most positive, energetic, enthusiastic people,” she says. “I just had so much energy. I think the thing that’s saddest for me is that if I don’t get all the way better, they will never know that version of me. My abilities were just so diminished. It was such a disappointment.
“But now it’s all coming back,” she says. “Yeah, it’s really heartening.”
Why trust our experts?
