Julie Rehmeyer on “The Mystery Illness That Plagued This Writer For Years”
June 1, 2017
Julie Rehmeyer wrote about her experiences camping in Death Valley to determine whether she was reactive to toxic mold in an article in O: The Oprah Magazine called “The Mystery Illness That Plagued This Writer for Years.”
From the article:
On one new friend’s wall was a stream of posts theorizing that toxic mold had caused her illness. By scrupulously avoiding the mold, she claimed, she’d gone from being bedbound to mostly recovered. I rolled my eyes. Pseudoscientific hokum, I thought; mold might cause asthma or allergies, but it can’t cripple you.Then something caught my eye: a post from a 20-something guy who’d been living mold-free in the desert for two months and was back to hiking and lifting weights. As I imagined running through the mountains again, I felt as though longing would burst my heart.
But the theories espoused by the moldies, as they called themselves, didn’t seem relevant. They described having lived in homes where mold oozed from cracks—I never had. They told stories of fainting upon walking into some buildings—not me. Still, the 20-something’s story haunted me, so I reached out and was invited into the moldies’ email group.
More than one of them zeroed in on the travel trailers I was living in, almost certainly mold magnets. I felt a shiver of recognition: I’d first started feeling sick when my ex-husband and I had lived in the trailers while building the house. If I’d lived in just one contaminated space, said the moldies, my belongings could have picked up enough spores to keep me sick. Think, they said, of the havoc infinitesimal fragments of peanut dust could wreak on someone with a serious allergy.
It was as coherent a theory as anything else I’d heard. And the moldies were hardly dim-witted kooks, among them a Harvard-trained lawyer, an MIT computer scientist, an art history professor. They suggested an experiment: spend two weeks in the “GFD”—the godforsaken desert, in their lingo—with none of my own contaminated belongings and let my body “get clear.” When I returned home and was reexposed, they claimed, I’d become really, really sick. After that, I could learn to “perceptify”—detect mold, based on my own bodily responses—and avoid it so I could recover. It sounded nuts, but the idea of having an adventure, even when I was so damn sick, at least made me feel like me. What did I have to lose?
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