Mold Toxicity
The thing that uprooted my family's life in a matter of months and why it matters
“Nothing’s wrong, you’re perfectly healthy.”
That’s what many doctors told my wife over the past year after we went from specialist to specialist to try and figure out why she wasn’t feeling herself.
The last month has been a hectic one — it’s no excuses for not having written something for you all. I strive to write at least once a a week, but between moving apartments and preparing for three major races, writing took a bit of a back seat.
Now — after both finally figuring out what was plaguing my wife’s health for so long and getting her approval to share her story with you all — I can talk about what was affecting us both heavily for the past year.
Last February,
We went on a snowboarding trip up to Killington, Vermont for my birthday. The trip was great, we both learned how to carve on the front side of our boards, but that didn’t come without some hard falls.
Toward the end of our trip, both of us took some whiplash-inducing falls that caused us both to think the same thing: “Yep, no more snowboarding.”
For weeks after, Bekah hadn’t been feeling herself.
Headaches persisted, vicious, full-body tremors that caused her whole nervous system chaos came at random, and her hands and feet would often go cold. My first thought was nerve damage from the fall on the slopes. Could she have really fallen that hard?
A few more weeks went by and the symptoms receded. Spring time rolled around and running season started for both of us in preparation for the NYC Marathon. But then, despite the nice weather and seemingly easy runs, April and May came with more struggles.
Tremors, neck pain, and random bouts of queasiness and stomach bugs that caused her to miss days of work at a time. We figured it was time to schedule appointments with primary care.
After a check-in with our doctor, Bekah was referred to a cardiologist and neurologist to see if we could get to the bottom of whatever it was she was feeling.
It sounded like one of the two doctors could solve it — tremors felt closely tied to neurological dysfunction, but we started spiraling thinking of what EEGs and MRIs might show.
A cardiologist might be able to explain some of the feelings in her extremities, but I also worried that some of the sensations she was experiencing could be written off as “anxiety” if results showed nothing (more on this later).
Lastly, we also found an endocrinology office to look at immunological and thyroid function. Thyroid issues, which I’ve touched on before, can have a ripple effect throughout the body that aren’t easily traced back to the gland. So it felt like a logical approach to solving this health mystery.
Fast forward 4 months. It’s August, and we still haven’t found an answer.
The cardiologist found nothing wrong with her in doing labs and an EKG.
“Could just be anxiety.”
The 24-hour EEG the neurologist had her do yielded no abnormalities, and while they didn’t write it off explicitly as anxiety, they did recommend having her keep her stress levels in check.
Bekah works hard, but not in an unhealthy way. It felt almost like we were being talked down to when they told her to “manage her stress. Throughout the process, my frustration wasn’t really the fact that doctors couldn’t get to the bottom of her issues. Sure, it was disappointing, but more frustrating was the fact that instead of simply saying “we don’t know,” there was a default to assuming stress was the main cause of her issues.
I understand times are generally more stressful now for young people than they’ve ever been before. I’ve written extensively on how the millennial generation has it infinitely harder than our Boomer and Gen X counterparts, and it’s not even close.
It’s probably easy to repeat that to young patients as a doctor. But what I wish more practitioners had the courage to say is, “I’m not sure what it is,” and leave it at that. It’s not doing anyone favors to send them down the potential rabbit hole of "It could be _____ (insert ailment),” making someone feel worse than when they came in.
Lastly, the endocrinologist, despite running the most comprehensive blood panel we got, found nothing but some benign nodules on the thyroid, which are fairly common and harmless. This ruled out any sort of glandular pathology and made us both feel like we were going crazy.
And yet, I saw the tremors.
In the weeks before we left for Europe, I was woken up multiple nights to the bed shaking and Bekah feeling like she needed to go to the hospital. It didn’t help that she was dealing with the loss of her father at the time, but I hardly think that was the sole reason she was still experiencing symptoms.
Once we left for her birthday trip to Ireland, London, and Paris, however, something interesting happened.
Aside from one random spurt of shakes on our third full day in Ireland, Bekah’s symptoms mostly disappeared in Europe.
We were binging all of the Irish goods, sampling every cider and Guinness we could as we trekked the whole country across six days.
In London, we stayed out late and played cards at the pubs until midnight, again drinking ciders and waking up early for lattes and long marathon runs.
In France, we tried every wine (and a bit of champagne) and were woken up in our hotel room multiple nights by loud passersby stumbling home from the drinking at 3 a.m.
We were hardly living “healthy,” in Europe. And still, it was like Bekah had fully recovered. Nothing we did on our trip — like eating excess calories, sleeping less, and drinking more — was conducive to good homeostatic regulation. But it felt like she was back to her old self again.
Then, when we returned back to America and jumped back into marathon prep…boom.
A few tremors and near-hospital trips at 2 a.m. again led us to think that maybe the problem wasn’t within, but without. We spoke with some friends who had recommended we see a holistic specialist.
Bekah’s conversations with her doctor seemed like many of the ones I’ve had with Olivia. They were very much centered around things like gut disbiosis, allergies, histamines, and managing fatigue.
After the marathon, which it felt miraculous for Bekah to have completed given how drastically her training was affected by these physical problems, enough sleepless nights led us to the conclusion that there may be something in our environment that is causing the issues.
Cladosporium, Aspergillus Penicillium, and MARCoNS
All of these big words didn’t make much sense to us until February.
Bekah’s doctor recommended we do nasal swabs based on her symptoms and seeing a few weeks of minimal improvement on a supplement protocol. The results took about 3-4 weeks to come back, so we were waiting to see just what kind of things it would show.
As we understood it, we were testing for bacterial infections that could be caused by mold and water-damaged environments.
It’s probably no surprise that mold exists in New York City apartments. But the remediation rules — whether it was strategically implemented by NYC Housing authorities or not — around mold state that unless there’s mold perforating through more than 10 square feet of an apartment, there is no real “mold damage.”
It makes sense — fungal spores exist in almost every air sample a professional organization could take. The question is, how sensitive can someone be to these fungal spores, even if the levels are not high enough for remediation? That’s what we had to figure out.
Our results came back.
We were both positive for MARCoNS, or Multiple Antibiotic Resistant Coagulase-Negative Staphylococci. This bacteria is diagnosed when antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria colonize the nasal passages or sinuses, particularly in people with chronic inflammatory or immune-related conditions.
What scared me most was that, despite being asymptomatic (mostly), I had higher levels of it in my system than Bekah did.
I immediately hopped into the updated detoxification protocol Bekah was running with her doctor. Finally, we had an answer.
And soon, the protocol we upped the ante on did start working. A new nasal spray we implemented actually did clear up my sinuses and some brain fog that I didn’t even know I was dealing with.
I’m currently balancing more professional work than I ever have before (another newsletter on this coming soon), and it involves a fair bit of task-switching and multi-tasking that I realized I was losing sharpness on over the past few months.
Once we learned about the MARCoNS, the next step was to figure out exactly what or where it came from.
We ordered two air sampling tests, one from our building manager and another I hired privately, to see exactly what spores were causing us this distress.
Up to this point, Bekah had missed multiple weeks of work in 2025 and a few in 2026. There wasn’t a day she woke up until about February where she felt 100% herself.
Our building owner gave us a hard time about ordering the test. When it was finally performed, there weren’t any actionable items to go off of. All their report read was “no cause for remediation.” Nothing about spore counts, spore types, or anything we could bring back to our doctor.
So I hired a second team to come in. Their air sampling found moderate amount of cladosporium, a mold that is fairly common in most environments but can lead to severe immune issues and respiratory dysfunction.
Hypersensitivity pneumonitis, or shortness of breath, fatigue, chest pain and fever-like feelings, tracks closely to some of what Bekah had experienced.
Our doctor noted that she most likely had a case of Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), but after cross-referencing symptoms and our apartments spore counts, these amounts of cladosporium weren’t surprising.
Another fungus found was aspergillus penicillium, which also has downstream respiratory side effects.
We came to the conclusion that mold was in the apartment; we had to move.
New Beginnings, New Awarenesses
Was it ideal timing? Not necessarily.
The move was a bit rushed, and we needed to whip together documents, income, and money to make it happen. Ultimately, it was a short-term sacrifice for our long term health. Now, I’m in the picture above, writing this article to help some people understand that hidden health drawbacks can come from mold toxicity and mycotoxins.
Can this affect everyone? I’m not sure.
We’ll have to talk with Olivia about this.
But what I do know is that the hoops we had to jump through in the medical system to find our what was wrong is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Understanding that mold, even in some relatively harmless amounts, can negatively affect compromised immune systems in nasty ways can help explain a lot of what some blood work cannot.
When I posted about our mold story on Instagram, I had an unsettling amount of people ask me about our situation not just out of concern for us, but for themselves.
It’s scary to think that some people might be struggling with health issues that are undiscovered and hiding. I spent a few weeks ruminating about my MARCoNS before remembering it wasn’t killing me and taking steps to fix it.
But I wanted to talk about this to encourage people to advocate for themselves when it comes to health. You don’t necessarily need to agree with every doctor’s diagnosis if it doesn’t align with how you’re feeling internally.
When it comes to your health, you need to be absolutely certain you’re taking every step to address your overall well-being. Things can seem like they’re functioning at full-capacity, but without at least semi-yearly check-ins, you’ll never know.
It’s why I write this newsletter.
There were times I went down the rabbit hole of thinking Bekah was sick with something far worse.
Thankfully, knowing what it is actually has a paradoxical effect of helping keep us away from more care.
When a specialist’s office doesn’t know how to diagnose something, the default setting is to run every test possible. Logically, this makes sense.
But financially, it’s not a fun process to go through. I wouldn’t want anyone to spend thousands on their health like we did.
Medical debt is real, and I am thankful we didn’t make any irrational hospital visits out of fear.
I hope this newsletter encourages you to get a jump-start on your physician check-ins, blood work, and overall health.
If you have questions about the mold developments, comment below or e-mail me personally - fran@levolutionathletics.com.
Looking forward to being in your inbox again!