Starting to Piece Things Together

Since the sinus surgery, I’ll be honest. This is probably the best I’ve felt in a very very long time. I seriously cannot remember what it’s like to feel good.

My mouth still hurts though. Under my tongue, and in my cheeks. As I’ve started to dwell on what the new pathology has shown, I started to really think deep about the past. Lab errata. Things I didn’t pick up on before. Because, I wasn’t focused on what the cause is, just the effects.

Rewind back to IL. 2010. My wife and I “upgraded” apartments. Kids were visiting more. We needed more space. For what it’s worth, a 1 bedroom apartment is cramped as shit.

We moved literally across the hall. Easiest move of my life. But there was something different about the new apartment. Never really felt right. And I could always pick up on strange smells. At the time, I thought nothing of it.

As time went on, my chronic infections became more frequent. The acne turned its game up to an 11. At the time, I couldn’t explain it. I just dealt with it, and ignored it after awhile. As 2013 came, I had enough of the leasing office. Their constant stupidity. Not doing maintenance requests. Just being assholes. Realistically the straw that broke the camels back, was when a drunk driver hit Anies car, pushed her car into 2 other cars, backed up, hit my car and took off. Happened on Thanksgiving. He hit our cars not more than 3 minutes after we got home. Luckily there was a cop already on the property responding to another car. They caught him. But I’d had enough. Time to move.

We moved to funny enough, the first apartment complex I moved to, when I originally moved back to IL. That move went fine. I felt like shit. But I moved everything. At this point, I’ve gone through several root canals, and a few rounds of pneumonia. I moved mostly everything myself except for the big stuff, like beds, the couch. Etc. I didn’t want to pay the movers to move everything. Just trying to save money.

The final week, it was getting pretty thin in the apartment, but that strange smell got worse. How? In the new apartment when I walked in, it smelled amazing. Of course fresh paint. But it smelled clean. The more I returned to the old apartment, the more I could smell it. It smelled musty. Wet. Stagnant.

As I walked into our bedroom, I pulled our bed away from the wall, and was greeted with:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I sat there in shock for at least 30 seconds. Literally that spot was at the head of the bed. Sleeping not only 1ft away from it. For years. It wasn’t there when we moved in, but it sure as hell was there as we moved out. My mind began to race. First thing I thought of was the kids. I ran into their room and told them to grab whatever they could and get out of the apartment. I packed what I could in the car, and left everything else in the bedroom. The first thing that came to my mind was contamination.

The bed is absolutely not coming with. Along with the sheets, pillows. Anything cloth I left behind. I felt more and more nauseated the more I thought about it. My skin was just crawling. I came back after dropping the kids off at the new apartment. And the smell now was just rancid. Having the bed butted up against that for so long. I’m pretty sure the roof replacement had something to do with that. In 2011 they replaced the roof on the building, but of course, we had really bad thunderstorms while the roof was removed. I’m pretty sure that’s how the water got in.

The closer I got to our bedroom, the worse it got. And at the time, I wasn’t thinking about what was going on with me. I decided fuck it. I shut the door. And left.

The next day the movers came to grab all the heavy stuff. But I told them to not go in the bedroom. That the door is not to be opened. An hour later, everything but what was in the bedroom was out of the apartment. I opened the bedroom door as we left and I wanted to gag. That smell I’ll never forget.

Being in the new apartment, the strange symptoms started to go away. The rashes. The itchiness. The recurring infections. Didn’t put another thought into it. I called the old leasing company, and told them what I found, and said that I won’t be paying the remaining rent, and that we won’t be coming back to clean. I was just glad to be out of that hazardous environment.

Why does all this matter? Mold. And I’m clearly more affected by it than others.

Fast forward till now. The pathology results suggest that both staph and mold was at play in my sinuses. Which got me thinking yesterday. Could being in that toxic environment been what started all this? I mean it’s not responsible for the immune disorder, but it sure as hell didn’t help things either.

That’s when it clicked this morning. When I was getting worked up for Lyme, another thing that Dr. Naylor wanted to investigate, was an infection known as MARCoNS. It’s where mold creates a biofilm around bacteria. And just creates 1 big mycotoxins producing factory. Since the staph they pulled from my sinuses is most likely Coagulase Negative Staph, again, that’s the bacteria everyone has, it’s now colonized in my sinuses. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this.

As I started to read into dematiaceous mold, one of the articles mentioned genetic dispositions. And I literally said holy shit. In 2018, I had DNA testing for Crohns, and Celiac. And that test did show some mutations. But at the time, there wasnt much information. I then remembered an allergen test that Dr Sarid ran that tested food, and environmental allergens. The only thing that stuck out in that test, was an extreme hypersensitivity to any mold that was tested during that test. Things are now starting to make way too much logical sense now. Going back to looking at the genetic mutations found:

These variants have been known to be directly responsible for people to be easily infected with mold.

The mold exposure in 2010-2013 is what contributed to where I am now. Since they pulled those pathogens from my sinuses, this is starting to really make way too much sense.

When Anies and I moved to CO, the symptoms started to go away. But when we moved to a different place, the strange illnesses returned. Not only a week after we moved in, the upstairs neighbors water heater exploded. Dumping water everywhere. It started coming down into our closet where everything is kept, it was also coming out of the air vents. Knowing the place we are at now, as I write this, is now almost non-coincidental.

I started to research mycotoxins, being immunocompromised, and search results started to show me things that I am all too familiar with. I was shocked. Maybe this is the answer. This has been the contributing problem the entire time, I just wasn’t paying attention to everything that I am now.

Having CVID makes me susceptible to bacteria, viruses, and you guessed it. Mold. Fungus. You could basically say, the lightbulb was finally screwed in.

So I reached out to Dr Naylor and told him the findings from the sinus surgery. He replied with “You need to be seen ASAP, I’ve added you to the cancellation list”.

Because I know infectious disease thinks they have treated this. But they haven’t. Most likely, the easiest conclusion that I can come up with is this:

The mold exposure in conjunction with CVID caused these crazy infections. The staph and mold are working together and have been the entire time, and realistically this is what’s known as Mold Toxicity. Since the surgery I’ve felt better. So this means we removed some of it, I’m sure the rest of it is what I feel in my face.

You can even see a trend in my vital signs changing since the surgery. Lower resting heart rate, lower blood pressure. Even breathing slower.

So what do we do?

Easy. Remove the contaminants from my sinuses and face. Keep me on the voriconazole and Dalbavancin. Use medication to mix into my sinus rinse to make sure all the contaminants are flushed out.

Being a data-driven, science-based, fact based person, this is one of the plausible explanations I can have with what this is, and what has literally kept me so sick the past few years.

Maybe this is the light at the end of the tunnel I was looking for. It took too long to piece all this together, but the more I research, and compare symptoms, past infections, shit, current infections. This makes way too much sense.

I’m no doctor, but looking at everything from a 10,000 ft view, that’s what all this really could be.