Health Rising on “Julie Rehmeyer’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Recovery Story”
May 2, 2014
Health Rising interviewed writer Julie Rehmeyer about her experiences with mold avoidance in a blog post titled “Constant Vigilance: Julie Rehmeyer’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Recovery Story.”
From the article:
While I was in Death Valley, I felt slightly better, but well within the range of normal variability. Before I went home, I went to Reno to visit Erik Johnson, the “mold warrior” who was one of the famous Tahoe cohort and who was the first ME patient to figure out the role of mold in his illness. He took me to some bad buildings around Lake Tahoe to help me learn the early symptoms of exposure.
I was extremely skeptical at that point, not being at all sure that this theory applied to me, and I was even more skeptical when I didn’t seem to feel much in the bad places he took me to. But indeed, a few hours after my “mold tour,” I could barely walk (a symptom I hadn’t been having much at that particular period). That was the first indication that I was hypersensitive to mold. I was very excited and fired off emails to friends: “Woohoo! I can’t walk!”
Then I went home to New Mexico, which I’d moved back to from Berkeley. My house was rented out and I was living in those same travel trailers I’d been in when I first started to get sick. Thirty seconds in my trailers was enough that I could barely walk a a few hours later. I also had more immediate symptoms that weren’t quite as acute.
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