I Was Sick, and Now I Am Well

I was physically ill for six years, and now I am well. Some of my friends know this story, but most don’t. I don’t like to share bad news without some solution, and the solution took a long time, in this case. I feel like the situation is finally resolved, so I’d like to tell the story now.

Background

Starting around when I was 12, I would often fall asleep almost uncontrollably after eating and stay asleep for about four hours. I also would sleep a lot at night, sometimes up to 12 hours, and was very hard to wake up in the morning (like you had to yell at me or physically drag me out of bed). Some people attributed it to “being a teenager,” but there was more going on than that. It kept happening, and finally when I was 18, somebody mentioned to me that a friend of theirs had a similar problem and it was related to eating sugar. So I cut out eating sugar (super hard, by the way, for the first two weeks, and then it gets much easier) and things got dramatically better. I still had trouble with staying awake or falling asleep sometimes, but it wasn’t happening all the time, anymore.

Fast-forward to late 2016. I decided to do some religious activities that were incredibly important to me, but which involved traveling for a few months. My wife also coincidentally needed to travel, sometimes to the same locations. So we moved out of our apartment and put all of our stuff in storage, and I had an incredible adventure that changed my life.

I came back in 2017 with the most mental clarity, drive, and emotional stability I’d ever experienced in my life. I also needed to find a new place to live, since our stuff was still in storage. My wife was still away, so I stayed in an AirBnB by myself for about a month while I looked for a place. I eventually found a wonderful place in Brisbane, California, with a truly amazing view:

However, around this time it seemed like my falling asleep problem was getting worse again. It was causing enough trouble that I went to see my incredible MD at OneMedical, probably the best doctor I’d ever had. We did some blood tests, and she told me that I most likely had something called “reactive hypoglycemia.” Those are some fancy words that mean, “when you eat, your blood sugar goes very low about an hour later.” It’s a pre-diabetic condition where your body releases too much insulin after you eat, so your blood sugar goes too low. That explained the whole falling asleep thing that had been happening since I was a kid!

This led me down a truly amazing path where eventually, with the help of many other people, I actually fixed the condition. That is, I no longer had reactive hypoglycemia. One of the things I’ll call out here is that I discovered Dr. Berg, who had incredible YouTube videos providing a lot of super-helpful education on how the body works and what to do about all sorts of specific conditions—advice that actually worked when I applied it. As a result of his advice, I switched to doing the “keto” diet, which I’m still on. I loved doing it so much, and so many things got better for me when I did it, that I stuck with it even after my reactive hypoglycemia was fixed.

So by mid 2018, I was in the best shape of my life, sleeping great, and doing generally great in life.

The Start

In April of 2019, I started wheezing and developed some flu-like symptoms. I went to my wonderful MD at OneMedical, she listened to my lungs, and told me that I almost certainly had pneumonia. We could either wait two weeks for scar tissue to develop on my lungs so that we could see it in an X-ray and prove that I had pneumonia, or I could take a five-day course of Azithromycin (an antibiotic) and just handle it. I opted to take the antibiotic, and it totally worked. After five days of lying in bed and taking this pill once a day, my pneumonia went away, yay!

Some time shortly after, however, I started to have one odd symptom. When I would try to sleep at night, my heart would beat very hard. Not fast, just hard, like each beat was a little sledgehammer inside my chest. It didn’t hurt, it was just distracting and made it hard to fall asleep. Thankfully, Dr. Berg had some useful advice that Vitamin B1 tends to fix such symptoms. I started taking 100mg of B1 before I went to sleep, and it fixed the symptom. I did notice, though, that the amount of B1 I had to take to fix the symptom was slowly increasing over a period of months. That was odd, and I was mildly concerned that this symptom had appeared out of nowhere and kept taking more to fix it, but I was managing it, so I wasn’t really worried.

Financial Adventures

Between April and June of 2019, three different situations came to a head:

1. I had various different friends who I had lent money to, usually for some emergency situation in their life, where they had a “guaranteed” way to pay me back over the short term, usually within weeks or months. Since these had been “emergencies,” with “guaranteed” short-term repayment plans, I had lent some of that out using my personal credit cards. Some of my friends did pay me back, but others didn’t—including some of the largest loans I had given out, leaving me with quite a bit of credit card debt that I now had to make payments on myself.
2. Another person who I thought was a friend offered to help me reduce my debt load in a way that seemed great at first, but ended up giving me even more debt while also messing up my credit rating. Long story short, that person is no longer a part of my life.
3. Google modified my income in a way that the compensation department thought was “keeping it the same,” but actually took away about 15% of my income. Google as a company was totally amazing back then, where most of the time you could go have a reasoned discussion with anybody at the company and they would do the right thing. The compensation department, however, was different in all of my experience there, where they operated on a formula and were not open to discussions about individual situations. I understand why they behaved this way, because compensation is such a difficult topic that also affects the company’s bottom line dramatically, but it was a particularly bad time for this to occur in my life.

This put me in a very awkward situation. I actually couldn’t declare bankruptcy. My income was too high to declare one form of personal bankruptcy, and my credit card debt was too high to declare the other form. I had some savings, but the number in that account was going down every month—I was spending more than I was making, even when we got very frugal with our expenses.

The only solution was that somehow, I had to make more money. So I started looking for a new job. However, in my industry (computer programming) that means a lot of practice for interviews.

At the time, I was working about 80 hours every week. I had my full-time job at Google, and then another full-time job on nights and weekends for a nonprofit that I was incredibly passionate about. However, something had to give in order for me to be able to practice, so I arranged to take some time off from my nonprofit work even though I was desperately needed there.

This meant that I was spending a lot more time in my house than I usually did, sitting at my computer, and doing practice interview exercises. (This will become relevant later, which is why I’m including this in the story of my illness.) Thankfully, it paid off. I had interviews with multiple companies, got two offers, and eventually accepted a fantastic role with LinkedIn. The new role would pay enough to save me and my family, plus I was just excited about the work and the people I was going to get to work with.

While I was going through this process, though, something else started to happen.

Brain Fog

Between April and July of 2019, some very weird things started to happen. I started falling asleep for about twenty minutes at my desk after I would eat, but it wasn’t a problem with my blood sugar. I also started to forget things, feel randomly confused, and have moments of emotional instability.

What was really strange was that this was affecting me even during my nonprofit work. You have to understand that I was so fired up about what I was doing there that usually nothing affected me while I was there. It didn’t matter what was happening in the outside world, or even how well I was doing physically—when I was there, I was driven, focused, and happy. So it was very weird that these things started to happen even there.

Finally in July of 2019, my head just fell over at my desk one day. Not like I fell asleep, like I had to put my head down and I could not pick it up. When I could pick it up, I felt like there was an impenetrable fog between me and the rest of the universe. I could barely think, walk, or talk. I texted my boss that I had to go lie down in a room. I went and laid down in a room for an hour, feeling like I was on drugs the whole time. That’s pretty odd, since I’ve never done drugs, drank alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or even drank coffee in my life (just didn’t want to do any of those things). Eventually I got up and was able to function for the rest of the day.

A few days later, this happened again. Over time, it started to happen more and more frequently, sometimes to the point that I couldn’t make it to work, or that I would come in very late. I didn’t understand what was happening, was I lazy? Was I not eating well? I think my bosses at both jobs just thought I was being irresponsible, or something.

Then I started having trouble sleeping at night. I was used to this from back in the reactive hypoglycemia days, which came along with a lot of insomnia. I thought I had had every sort of sleep trouble, before, whether it was having trouble falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, whatever. But no, apparently there was a whole new type of sleep trouble that I had never experienced before, oh joy! In any case, it started with the heartbeat problem I described above (my heart beating very hard), started to include some other symptoms, and got slowly worse over time.

I started to get concerned. I had never had an illness that lasted longer than a week or two. I had symptoms that seemed to be getting continuously worse, rather than better. So I went to see my wonderful MD again.

First Attempts at Diagnosis

I described my symptoms to my MD and she seemed mystified. This was the first time I had ever stumped her. (She was the best MD I’d ever had.) So we did some blood tests. They came back entirely clean, other than my Vitamin D levels being low like most of the rest of humanity.

After seeing her a few times on it, she very bravely said that my symptoms might be something that was showing up in modern research—not generally accepted by most medical practitioners, but she believed would be mainstream within the next ten years—called “leaky gut.” Essentially, my intestinal lining had degraded and so instead of my body excreting toxins, they would “leak” back into my bloodstream through my intestines.

It turns out she wasn’t wrong, but leaky gut is actually a symptom of some other condition. It’s not a root cause. However, it’s all I had to go on, at the time.

She had me do a special diet called the Low FODMAP Diet. “FODMAP” is just an acronym for a bunch of different substances that cause fermentation to happen in the gut when you eat. The idea of the diet is that you avoid these things, and that avoids toxins from getting into your bloodstream through your deteriorated gut lining.

The diet did help me feel a little better, but only for a short period of time. Eventually, what seemed to be happening is that I got more and more sensitive to these fermentation-causing substances, until almost anything I ate was causing me trouble.

So, I started to look for a medical provider who could help me more deeply, and also hopefully get me a better diagnosis.

The Worst of It

My attempts at finding a provider were interrupted by a few things, mostly by the condition itself making it harder and harder to think, stay awake, or do things other than the core things that I had to do to stay alive.

Eventually, by February of 2020, it got so bad that I was only able to sleep for about three hours at a time, I was constantly exhausted, my brain felt like it was swimming in a sea of ammonia, and my hormonal state was essentially “I’m dead but somehow I’m not actually dead.” I would sleep for three hours, be awake for however long it took me to get sleepy again, then go back to sleep. I have no idea how much I slept or was awake for that whole month. When I was awake, all I did was sit in a chair at my desk and either work, or when it wasn’t work time (or when I was so bad off that I had to take a sick day) play video games. The brain fog never went away.

Every single day, I was the most tired I had ever been in my life, a feeling that I would continue to have for years. That’s a remarkable statement coming from a person who previously had had extensive sleep troubles for decades due to hypoglycemia. One time in college I stayed awake for 50 hours. (I have to say, I don’t recommend it! 1 star.) But at this point, I felt more tired every day than I did that time in college.

I even started falling asleep even when I was driving. After one time falling asleep for ten seconds on the freeway, I severely restricted my driving to times when I was confident I would be able to survive the drive. This kept me at home a lot, and started preventing me from going into work at all. (In a weird way, the pandemic saved my career, because I was able to work from home for years with no objection from my employer.)

In general, I had no idea what was happening. I was very, very concerned that I might be dying. I ended up taking a short-term medical leave from work because after a certain point, I couldn’t even work.

Thankfully, I found Root Cause Medical Clinic, which at the time was located in California and actually run by two wonderful friends of mine. They had a practice that integrated traditional medicine, chiropractic, and holistic medicine. We did a bunch of tests that showed that I had some nutritional deficiencies. That was wild, since I had been eating incredibly well thanks to keto. Also, it wasn’t really a diagnosis of a specific condition, but it was at least something to go after.

The doctor suggested a set of supplements for me to take. When I started taking them, I quickly regained basic function, and over time, I was able to go back to work and function somewhat normally. We also discovered that I was super-allergic to eggs—even the tiniest amount of egg would prevent me from sleeping. That was weird, because I definitely had not been allergic to eggs earlier in my life. However, eliminating them did eliminate some of my sleep troubles.

Unfortunately, I hit a ceiling on what all of that treatment would do for me. I was still frequently nonfunctional and had extensive trouble sleeping, still. My sleep schedule would shift around wildly, I would still have many days where I couldn’t sleep more than 3-4 hours, and I still had constant brain fog. I remember the first moment I had fifteen minutes of mental clarity after almost a year of swimming in fog. That fifteen minutes, and all the progress that led up to it, absolutely came from my treatment and work with Root Cause, and I was incredibly grateful for it. But I wasn’t getting well, yet.

The Next Phase

Some time in 2020, I was traveling in Florida and I saw another MD. I described my symptoms to her, and she was totally mystified, didn’t even know where to start. She suggested I get my heart checked out (eventually I did do that, later, and there was nothing wrong with it).

Thankfully, a friend of mine suggested that I go and see Dr. Richard McBride in Clearwater, Florida. He did some tests on me right in his clinic and gave me a special enzyme supplement that almost immediately (within 15 minutes or so) made me feel better than I had in years. I could not believe how much better I felt, and how quickly it happened. He also had me do some lab tests that came back a few weeks later, and we started a treatment program based on his tests. This worked better than anything I had done so far. I highly recommend Dr. McBride—not only are his services inexpensive, they are remarkably effective.

I also learned here an important lesson: if you have a difficult illness, a medical provider will be effective to the degree that they have objective tests that provide a specific diagnosis. That diagnosis should fully explain the symptoms that you have, and lead to a clear treatment that actually works when you apply it.

Dr. McBride and I worked together for about two years or so. Some parts of the treatment were difficult, some were easy, but I continued to get better until I hit a ceiling much like I had with other providers. I was better, but I wasn’t well. I also still didn’t really know what the condition was. Whatever it was, it was still dramatically affecting my life.

A Wonderful Surprise

In June of 2021, this guy came into our lives:

I’m super grateful to Dr. McBride for helping me get into a state where I could help my wife through labor and the newborn stage (where the baby is sleeping for two hours and then awake for two hours, 24 hours a day, and where I was frantically cleaning and washing bottles almost every time he was asleep).

I actually was able to manage the illness well enough that I could keep it mostly invisible to my son for the next three years, other than that he was spending a lot more time with his mom than with me. When I had to lie down or sit down somewhere, I would just hand off his care to his mom and then go somewhere else.

Some people might think “why try to keep this from your son?” Well, a tiny child can’t do anything about a parent’s illness. All it does is cause them a sense of instability, and what small children need most is love and stability. Plus, I couldn’t tell him anything about it, really. I couldn’t promise him that it would get better. I had been reassured a few times at this point that there was nothing that indicated I was dying (that is, it didn’t seem like I had anything that would kill me) but I honestly wasn’t confident of that still, because I didn’t feel confident in any diagnosis I had received. So what I wanted to do was show him love and show him that his family was stable, and then I would handle the situation to make it stable. I was very determined to solve this, even if it took a long time.

Diagnosis

In 2022, a friend suggested that I go to Anatara Medicine in San Francisco. She had had similar symptoms to mine and they had given her an accurate diagnosis and a lot of help.

I will admit that when I read the website, I was skeptical. Despite how much help I had gotten from practitioners of alternative medicine, I was still pretty skeptical of treatments I hadn’t heard about where I didn’t have a good understanding of the science behind them. So I put off contacting them for a while, until my friend (and my wife) got very insistent and I finally scheduled an initial call.

After about five minutes of me describing my symptoms, Dr. Mansour (now at another clinic) said, “That sounds like mold. Have you been tested for that? Could be lyme, lupus, or mold, but mostly that sounds like mold.” This was pretty wild, because a few weeks prior to that, my wife had been reading something on Facebook about mold, and had insisted that we get our house tested. In the next few weeks, we got back the results and mold levels in the house were very high, including a highly dangerous variety of “black mold.”

So I went in to Anatara. I got to spend two hours with Dr. Mansour on my initial visit where he really dove into everything about my medical history and did a few physical tests on me right in the office. I had never gotten so much time and attention from any medical provider.

The clinic had me do the most extensive set of lab tests that I had ever done in my life, and between my description of my symptoms and what showed up on the lab tests (actual problems that looked legitimately concerning), we determined that my condition was related to mold.

A Little Bit About Mold

Let me explain a little bit about “mold-related illness,” as they tend to call it. I’m not a medical professional, but I am a person who had this illness for six years, and so I know a few things about it.

Mold, when it gets into your body via being eaten or inhaled, produces a toxin (poisonous substance) called a “mycotoxin.” “Myco” means “mold.” There are many different types of mold, just like there are different types of dogs. Each of these types of mold produces a different toxin, and those toxins have different effects. Interestingly, the effects of these mycotoxins are usually well-known and well-established in science—you can usually just look them up on Wikipedia and it will tell you at least some of what they do. However, diagnosis of them is very difficult, and treatment of them is only possible with cutting-edge methods that are not known to most medical professionals.

In my case, I had multiple mycotoxins in my body, the most important one being a toxin from black mold. This had many effects on my body:

• As noted before with “leaky gut” it degraded the lining on my intestines.
• It interfered with my endocrine (hormone) system, especially with my adrenals and my thyroid. Adrenal issues feel like unexplained anger, frustration, sleep issues, vision problems, heartbeat regulation troubles, and more. Thyroid issues feel like being sad for no reason, extreme fatigue, and other sleep issues.
• It interfered with my immune system, similar to both an autoimmune disease (causing my immune cells to attack parts of my own body). (Perhaps ironically, one of the other mycotoxins was acting to suppress my immune system, so these were probably “fighting” each other to some degree.)
• It inflamed many parts of the body (including the heart, which explained my weird heartbeat problem, though that was only explained to me by a later doctor).
• It interfered with my brain and nervous system, causing the severe “brain fog” that I was experiencing.

Perhaps most importantly, the mycotoxins interfered with my body’s own ability to remove the mycotoxins. Normally, toxins are filtered out of your bloodstream by your liver. However, mycotoxins interfere with this process in multiple ways, causing your body to essentially recycle them back into your bloodstream over and over. It gets worse when you eat, because they tend to stick in the bile in your gallbladder, and your body uses that bile to help digest fats when you eat them. So you eat fats (which you must do to survive, they are an essential nutrient) and then you experience severe symptoms above and beyond your normal day-to-day symptoms.

So once you build up a critical mass of mycotoxins, you sort of just have them. Most people never recover from this illness.

The most common treatment for mold-related illness involves taking a “binder” every day (essentially charcoal) to get it slowly out of the system, along with supplements to address the problems it’s causing. There are multiple phases of the treatment that involve different tests and many interactions with your medical provider. Most practitioners who treat mold illness will do something like that.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Well, literally I believe it does work, but the full protocol ends up being so complex that it’s very difficult for a person with a mold-related illness to do it, because they are suffering from severe brain fog and severe hormonal issues that make sticking to a complex program somewhat difficult. I did meet a person who did it and said they felt fully well after 13 years. So that’s the other issue—it takes a long time.

However, all practitioners agree that the most important thing you need to do is remove your body from the source of the mold. Unfortunately, that’s usually your house.

The House

As I mentioned, it turned out our house was moldy. In particular, the area where my work desk was at home had extensive mold contamination, as did the wall right next to where I was sleeping. (Remember when I said it would be relevant that I had had to spend more time at my work desk right around when this was getting very bad? Well, there we go.) My wife, coincidentally, had moved her work desk to a space with no mold, and slept on the side of the bed far away from where the mold was.

The house had been renovated in the 1990’s. When they did this, they glued the interior drywall straight onto the concrete exterior wall of the house. This was normal, except in this house’s situation. You see, the bottom floor of the house was partially underground. The house was on a steep hill, so there was actually dirt up against the wall at a steep angle going down. This means that when it rains, the water soaks into the dirt. Concrete is porous, so the water goes through the concrete, and into the drywall.

Mold needs three things to live: temperature (not too cold), water, and food. It eats cellulose (plant fibers) which is a main ingredient in drywall. If anything containing cellulose is wet for 24 hours or more, it has almost certainly grown mold. Our drywall had been wet for 30 years.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been told by mold experts that what you’re supposed to do in that situation is put a pressure-treated wood framework between the drywall and the concrete, so that water doesn’t go directly from the concrete into the drywall.

Fixing this problem involves, essentially, rebuilding your house. In the case of this house, it involved tearing out the downstairs walls and fully rebuilding both of the bathrooms in the house. Thankfully we were renting, so this wasn’t an expense I had to pay, but was an unfortunate burden for my landlord (who otherwise was a wonderful and kind lady). I found an excellent mold remediation company and she hired them to do all of the tear-outs.

Unfortunately, the property manager hired an incompetent contractor to do all of the rebuilds, apparently on the basis that he was cheap. I think he messed up every single thing he did. He installed the new windows upside down. He mis-installed the new drywall. He mis-installed the new plumbing. He didn’t prime the walls in the bathroom before painting them. He didn’t grout any of the tubs or new sinks correctly. And on and on. He also took a very long time to do all of these things poorly, and failed to fix them even after coming back multiple times.

While all of this was going on, we had to live somewhere else. We lived in three different AirBnBs for about four months. (We had to move multiple times, mostly because the work took longer than expected and the AirBnB wasn’t available to be extended.)

When we finally came back, with the contractor messing up so much, we had no faith that the problem was actually fixed. Certainly, the plumbing errors he made would have easily caused the mold problem to re-occur. This house was just too much trouble. So we decided we had to move.

Moving

Moving out of a house with mold is wildly complex. I am so grateful to have had the chance to speak with John Banta who is one of the world’s leading experts in mold inspection and remediation. I also got to read his book, Mold Controlled, which helped me understand what we needed to do in terms of throwing things out or cleaning things.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t be inside the house for longer than about three hours without turning into a mental zombie. You see, even if you fix the house, your stuff still has mold spores all over it as a result of sitting in the house for so long. Plus it’s likely that some of the books (or other stuff made of cellulose in the house) had grown mold. So I couldn’t spend weeks cleaning every item in the house and packing it up myself.

But it was very important that we didn’t bring those spores into a new house. You see, black mold doesn’t grow naturally in the wild. As I understand it, it’s unique to our human indoor spaces. So you have to prevent it from “coming with you” when you move.

I had to hire a special moving company that John himself had trained in how to clean each item. The cleaning isn’t that hard—mold comes off with soap and water. Or for things that you don’t want to get wet, like unfinished wood, you can use a dry microfiber cloth. But you need people who know how to do it for each item that could be in a house, and you need a lot of them even to move a small house. I think my house was about 1400 square feet, and it took three days to move it. That included throwing out about 75% of what I owned.

Some people think you need to throw out everything you own from a mold-infested house. That’s not true, and John’s book explains what you do and don’t need to throw out. However, in our case, we did have to throw out a lot of things, including all our mattresses and couch. That means that you have to buy a lot of new furniture for the new house. We also had to live in an AirBnB during the move (the same one we had already been in for a while). So for about two months I had three houses (the one I was moving out of, our AirBnB, and the one we were moving into) while we scheduled the move, did the move, and then bought all the new furniture we needed in order to actually live in the new house.

Eventually we were in the new place, though, and it was wonderful. My symptoms improved significantly—I was no longer a constant zombie, and I had more and more time where I could think clearly. It was also such a beautiful house, in a really wonderful location.

Progress

Anatara Medicine, the clinic that I was with, was helping me a lot. Unfortunately, I had moved to a place that was an hour’s drive from the clinic, and part of the treatment they wanted me to do was in-office IVs. I was able to get in one time for the IV, but my condition usually made it impossible for me to drive. I couldn’t even sit in an Uber for that long, because I would get super dizzy and carsick.

As a result, a lot of my consultations with Anatara were on the phone. I actually believe that Anatara would have handled my condition, eventually, but I simply wasn’t able to get in to the office and do everything they wanted me to do. As a result, I once again hit a ceiling in terms of how well I was doing. I was better than I had been at any time in the last four years, but I was still very clearly unwell.

Here I want to give a shout-out to my wife, who was both the person most affected by all of this (other than me) as well as the person who helped me the most during all of this time. She managed her own work, a baby, and her sick husband for years while remaining the wonderful, cheerful, and kind person that she is. Thankfully, I had built a successful career, enough that we could afford childcare for our son during all the times that I was unavailable to take care of him and she had to work. That still left a lot of the work of our family on her, though.

She comes to mind at this point due to a particular story that she and I both clearly remember, that illustrates what I mean when I say “I was still very clearly unwell.” We had plans to go somewhere together as a family, and I was busily getting ready in my room. She had gotten our son in the car and was getting annoyed that I wasn’t showing up, and walked back into the house to look for me. She found me on the floor of my room, unmoving, which is not the most exciting place to find your husband, I will tell you. I had been overtaken by my condition and had had to lie down right there on the floor with almost no warning, and was so forced down by the state of my body that I couldn’t talk. I could still move my arm, though, so when she asked me if I was all right I was able to give her a thumbs up, much to her relief. However, she had to go on without me as we both agreed (through her talking and me giving her a thumbs up) that we didn’t know when I would be able to stand up again or how functional I would be even when I did.

So there were still repeating incidents like that. I still had frequent and extensive fatigue, and constant sleep disruptions where my schedule would shift to me sleeping during the day (sometimes for weeks). All that said, a lot of the time I was relatively functional—much more so than I had been for the previous three years.

Move to Florida

My wife and I had been talking about moving to Florida for many years, for various personal reasons. We finally had the opportunity at the start of 2024, and we packed up and moved. Thankfully, this move was much simpler than the previous move, because we didn’t have to do all the “clean all the mold spores off” stuff again. We lived in a hotel for a few months while we looked for a new place, and eventually we found a great, mold-free home in Clearwater, Florida.

One of the reasons we moved here is that there are a surprisingly large number of medical providers here with some expertise in my condition. I was looking around for who would be my new doctor (since Anatara was now a whole country away from me) and a friend of mine recommended I talk to Dr. Roscoe at New Era Medical Center.

I went in to see Dr. Roscoe and was able to talk with him for an hour, telling him a lot of the story above as well as talking about my condition. Unlike other providers, Dr. Roscoe did not attempt to provide any thought about diagnosis without some form of physical test. The first test we did was in the office using a form of muscle testing to determine what might be affecting my body.

As a side note, I know there is a lot of skepticism about muscle testing and that it’s not a generally-accepted procedure for medical diagnosis. After many years of experiencing it as a patient across multiple different medical providers, I can tell you that it’s incredibly useful for the things that it’s good at, but it needs to be applied by a medical professional who understands how to use it, and it’s not sufficient by itself as the sole method of understanding the state of a body. However, it a key part of me getting well from a very real condition, and continues to be key to my ongoing improvements. I was very sick and now I am well, and that would not have happened without muscle testing as part of a larger program of diagnosis and treatment.

All that said, Dr. Roscoe didn’t pronounce any diagnosis with confidence just based on muscle testing alone. We then did the most extensive set of lab tests I’ve ever done in my life. I had 19 vials of blood taken for my LabCorp blood tests, along with multiple different urine tests and many other specialty tests. This included a specialty test from Vibrant Wellness, which among other things had the most accurate (in my personal experience) mycotoxin test of all of the (many) tests I had received. (Remember that I said before that the problem with mold-related illness is diagnosing it? It’s because a lot of the tests are unreliable.)

Dr. Roscoe then sat down with me for another hour after the test results came back and explained them in detail. He highlighted things on the tests and then went over them one by one, letting me take notes about what the test results meant.

These were also the most eye-opening tests I had received. It was super clear that there was something dramatically wrong. It was much clearer than any previous set of tests I had had. We discovered that I didn’t just have black mold, but three other conditions as well:

• It looked like I had possibly had Lyme disease and handled it via some treatment I had done with a previous provider. However, there are infections that come along with Lyme called “co-infections” and it seemed that I still had one of those. Not the most major of the conditions, but still good to know.
• I had never had COVID, nor had I been vaccinated (I rarely left my house during the pandemic, due to my illness, and was hyper cautious when I did), but somehow I had extremely high levels of COVID-19 spike protein in my bloodstream. To give you an idea, the “bad” number for that test is something like 300, and my number was around 11,000. This indicated some sort of Long COVID situation was happening, leading to a malfunction of my immune system. Surprisingly, not the most important part of the condition, either, but still relevant as part of my larger set of issues.
• I had intestinal parasites (tapeworms and more). I believe there is skepticism about this sort of diagnosis in the wider world, and I was also quite skeptical about it when he presented it to me. However, it turned out to be a significant part of my symptoms and resolving it made some important differences for me.

Plus, as I mentioned above, the test showed very clearly that not only did I have mycotoxins in my body, but very specifically a certain black mold toxin that almost fully explained my symptoms. The test itself came along with a lot of educational material that helped me understand what was happening, and Dr. Roscoe also went over it with me.

As I mentioned before, some mold toxins can cause an “autoimmune” condition, where your immune system starts attacking some of your body’s own cells. In this particular case, the toxin was setting off a series of events that started wearing away something called the “myelin sheathing” in my brain. You can think of the myelin sheathing like insulation on the nerves, like it keeps signals going down the path of your nerves instead of flying all over the place. When you degrade the sheathing, weird stuff happens. If the degradation gets bad enough, you have multiple sclerosis (MS). Thankfully, I did not develop MS, but I did have symptoms very similar to early-stage MS patients.

Dr. Roscoe suggested a program to address my condition that, frankly, sounded like voodoo to me when he first suggested it. It involved a series of actions I had never heard of, a set of IVs I had never heard of, and a three-phase nutritional supplement program involving a lot of supplements I had never heard of. Saying all of that is wild, considering how deep I had been for five years in both the traditional and non-traditional medical world for this condition, at this point. However, my friend had recommended Dr. Roscoe and I was desperate for any solution at this point, so I went with it. Plus, the testing and analysis phase had already been far better than any other provider I had ever seen.

The Program

The program, if I fully committed to it, involved being in the clinic five days a week for several months. Unfortunately, I still had to work, so I could only do mornings. (My job was on the west coast while I was on the east coast, so I had mornings available to handle my medical situation.) Not only that, but my condition itself frequently prevented me from coming into the clinic. The good news is that it was much closer to my house than Anatara had been—only a ten minute drive, with no freeways—which made it much more realistic for me to get there.

Plus the program involved a lot of IVs, and if we aren’t very close friends, you probably aren’t aware that I really don’t like needles. I get that some people don’t like needles, but let me tell you, I am a very loud person, and when you poke me with one of those things I will yell about as loud as I can. The whole clinic (and maybe people down the block) knew every time I was getting poked. Plus, my physical condition made me very poor at physically adapting to stress. As a result, every time you poked me I would space out, become unable to talk, and my vision would darken, for somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes. This meant that the nurse had to get it right on the first try (we couldn’t do it twice to me in one day or I risked going into shock or passing out) and that I had to be relatively well-rested and in somewhat acceptable shape before I even came in for the IV.

Thankfully, the supplement program helped me get into that better shape over time, so between the supplements, the IVs, and the other in-office therapies, I was able to slowly work my way through the program. When Dr. Roscoe proposed the IV program to me, he laid it out as a 12-week program. I did it in about a year.

One of the things that helped a lot is that when I left LinkedIn near the end of 2024, I had three months off before I started my new job. That allowed me the time to start going into the clinic every day. I spent about 8 – 9 hours in the clinic on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and about 3 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If Dr. Roscoe said to do something, I did it. Some of the therapies I wasn’t sure were helping me as much as others, but I didn’t care—I was there to get well and I was going to do anything that my medical provider said I should do.

The supplement program also involved a fair bit of discipline, but I had been taking so many things from the different providers, over the years, that I was used to it. If you ever saw me walking around with a black, insulated bag full of supplement and medicine bottles, it was because that was the only way I could (a) reliably transport everything I needed to take everywhere I went, and (b) actually remember what I needed to take. Remember, my immune system was eating my brain, and so the solution I had developed for remembering things was “put them physically in front of you in present time.” A big black bag was hard for me to miss, and pulling out the bottles themselves allowed me to (a) remember what I needed to take by looking at the bottles and (b) have a system to remember what I had taken. I had a tendency to forget things that had happened seconds or minutes ago, so I had to put the bottles back in the bag right after I took my dose. Even with all that, with many of my providers I kept a picture of my instructions with me (what to take, when) at all times. With Anatara, I even had developed a spreadsheet of what I needed to take. The supplement program I was on with Dr. Roscoe was actually one of the simpler ones, out of everything I had done.

The Results

I started to get slowly better over time. I think I had exhausted all of the “feel better immediately” solutions with what I had done at the other providers. However, I saw steady progress on the program with Dr. Roscoe.

When things are very bad, sometimes it’s hard to recognize that they are improving even though they’re not good yet. But, for example, I did see that I went from having 12-day-long sleep disruptions (where I would sleep only 4 – 6 hours each day, and sleep during the day) to having 8-day disruptions, then 7, then 6, etc. I felt clear-headed more and more of the time. I started to comment to my wife that I actually felt clear-headed most of the time. And if you remember, that’s a huge change compared to the worst of it in 2020 when I felt clear-headed none of the time.

The supplement program came in three phases. The first was a detoxification phase. I had done a lot of detoxification programs, so this wasn’t too hard or too intense. It seemed like it helped, but mostly for me it was just the step I had to do before we could do phase 2. (The phases have to be done in order for them to work.)

The second phase was a repair of my gut lining. Remember way back at the beginning, when my doctor said I had leaky gut? Well, I did, because the mold and other stuff had eaten away my gut lining. However, other providers I’d been with had only been able to say “yep, you have this.” With Dr. Roscoe it seems like we actually fixed it, and as far as I can tell it’s been totally fixed ever since. Various digestive symptoms that I had long before this condition even started have vanished, and I can eat a much wider variety of things with no negative consequences. My egg allergy vanished, too.

All of this made a huge difference in my symptoms, especially the ones that happen after I eat. Remember when I explained why mycotoxins recycle in the body? The degraded gut lining is one of the most important parts of that problem, and fixing it allowed me to see more regular improvement in my mold-related symptoms than I had seen with any other provider before.

Phase 2 also handled the intestinal parasites that we had detected. My experience here was that I didn’t experience much of a difference in my symptoms until they were totally gone, but once they were, the difference was significant. I stopped having random stress reactions, especially ones that would wake me up in the middle of the night. (Apparently the parasites get active at night, perhaps due to your body relaxing and not constricting their movement as much.) I also felt happier about my body and some of my tendency to get randomly angry disappeared. Plus all the other treatments we were doing seemed to be much more effective after the parasites were handled.

Then phase 3 was an enhancement protocol that involves some supplements that I still take that help with general health and energy level.

The real results came when I was able to do the IV and in-office therapies on an intense schedule for 3 months at the end of 2024. I got dramatically better week after week. I would estimate that when I first came in to see Dr. Roscoe, I was about 25% functional. Before these three months, I had gotten up to 50% or 60%. By the end of the three months, I was at 90%. I even had some unexpected improvements in conditions that I’d had long before my mold illness. For example, I had always had terrible motion sickness in airplanes, boats, and cars, which improved dramatically after my treatment program.

Before going into New Era Medical Center, I had started to doubt that I would ever be well, ever again in my life. I was stunned that I had gotten so much better in just a year. (Also remember my friend who did the more traditional protocol for mold and took 13 years to get well.)

One of the things that was most striking about going to New Era was that Dr. Roscoe had a program. Not a random set of supplements that he would tell you to take based on the conversation you just had that day in the office, but a consistent program that worked when applied. When I was struggling, I would go see Dr. Roscoe, and he would sometimes adjust some minor thing, but mostly he would just say, “your program is great, let’s keep rolling on it.” That’s what I expect out of medical science—a system that works reliably when you apply it, where if you keep doing it exactly as designed, you get well.

The program wasn’t easy for me, but it worked. I was functional enough to feel physically normal almost all the time. My chronic brain fog was nearly gone. I was sleeping normally most of the time. I was able to exercise, start spending a lot more time with my son, go on trips with my wife, and generally engage in society once again. I am forever grateful to Dr. Roscoe and all the staff at New Era Medical Center for making such a dramatic difference in my life.

Purification Program

After completing my medical program with Dr. Roscoe, I did the Purification Rundown (aka Purification Program) to address medical drugs I had taken during my various handlings with other providers. I also was hopeful that it would address any residual mycotoxins in my body. The program isn’t designed to handle mold, but my medical providers had described how the mycotoxins were being stored in my body, and it was identical to what the Purification Program handles. Since my program at New Era Medical had fixed my body’s detox pathways (both the gut lining and the liver issues), I was looking forward to seeing what would happen when I did a program that would trigger that process.

I had done the Purification Program before, but this time the before and after was dramatic. It handled nearly all of the mental symptoms that had been building up for years with the condition, as well as hugely restored my energy levels. It handled that last 10% of my ability to function normally, and when I finished, I knew that I was now basically well.

If you have read something negative about the Purification Rundown, let me tell you that it’s all based in nonsense propaganda from people who make money on other “solutions.” There’s no arguing with results, and my results were unmistakable. It was not “I feel a little better,” it was a night and day experience, a necessary part of the full handling of what had happened with me.

Going Foward

Since that time, there’s still some recovery that needs to be done. The mycotoxins wrecked a lot of stuff in my body, and it’s slowly healing various pieces over time. I still sometimes have some sleep trouble, but it’s nothing like what happened when I was unwell. Even if I don’t sleep enough, I’m often still totally functional for the whole day.

I never have brain fog or extreme fatigue like I did when I was sick. My vision doesn’t darken dramatically at random times, I don’t forget where I am or what I’m doing, I no longer have weird reactions to heat, I don’t get randomly angry or sad for no reason, and on and on. Plus, any symptoms that I do have, they’re getting better all the time. I still go in to New Era Medical every few weeks to adjust my follow-up plan, which mostly just involves taking some supplements and sometimes some minor changes to my diet here and there.

My experience of life and other people’s experience of me has dramatically improved. I’ve been able to spend tons of time with my son, becoming so active in his life that we’ve become super close and he always wants to spend time with me. I’ve been able to have a fantastic time at my new job, including more travel than I’ve ever done before in my life. Across the board, so much more of life has become available to me that was previously out of my grasp.

I am so grateful to everybody who helped me along the way. There’s still some more distance to go, but I’ve finally been stable for long enough that I can confidently say: I was sick, and now I am well.