It Gets Personal

We spent the rest of the first week of August at the lake getting somewhat reoriented and settled into the RV. Then it was time to face reality. We had a house full of things that needed to be emptied in order to move forward with remediation of the mold under the house. Since I was not nearly as reactive as most of the rest of my family, we decided that I would tackle the majority of the indoor personal content remediation.

And so began my war against fear.

For the next several weeks, fear was a constant companion and enemy. I could feel it creep into all of our thoughts and decisions, and I alternated between fighting it, and acknowledging that it was based in a real threat. In an effort to avoid carrying the mycotoxins and mold spores to our "safe zone" (the trailer), I took fairly serious measures. According to our research at the time, best practice was to suit up, wear a mask, and be careful with the clothing I wore underneath, all in an effort to avoid carrying toxic mold spores into our new environment. I even kept clothes in the garage that I would change into before putting on the suit. We just didn't know what we needed to be careful about and what we didn't. Don't get me wrong - this was our best attempt at an evidence-based approach to the situation. We had lost so much, and my overriding fear was continuing our losses and health issues by introducing the same toxins to the trailer. Wearing a suit seemed a small price to pay. I'm glad we eventually landed in a more flexible place, but I really can't fault us for taking these measures initially. (I ditched the mask pretty quickly since it interfered so much with my breathing in that hot plastic suit.)

Speaking of that, do you know how weird it feels to go through your house and throw away so many things that look perfectly fine? That was really tough for me, and I had to keep mentally reminding myself of the objective evidence we had to take this so seriously: the blood work and doctor's visits, the immediate positive changes we were experiencing in health, the professional mold analysis numbers. Still, it was extremely difficult to look at these things in our home that we had just been using the week before and recognize that were a health risk to my family. An invisible risk, but a real one nonetheless.

It was pretty universally confirmed that we needed to throw away everything soft or not washable - upholstered furniture, mattresses, toys, bedding, etc. Clothing was a much more debatable decision. We eventually resolved to replace nearly all of our clothing. Since the mold had made some of our family so sick for so long, and clothing is worn against the skin, it just wasn't worth the risk. Plus, even saving a streamlined wardrobe for seven people creates a high volume of clothing, which presented a lot of potential exposure issues. There just were no guarantees which fabrics and items the mold spores would wash out of and which ones wouldn't get clean enough. We saved a few hard-to-replace items for each of us, but other than that - it all had to go.

I'm so thankful for the friends that showed up to help in these initial days. I was in a complete daze. Mostly numb, overwhelmed by the task ahead, and second-guessing every step. They entered my mold-contaminated house with much less fear than I did. They helped me unceremoniously sweep soft items into black trash bags, and listened to me ramble and try to process the emotions of it all as I wrestled with the thousands of individual decisions that now fell on my shoulders. Essentially, it was now my job to touch and determine the fate of every single item in our home. Initially, I second-guessed most of the things I was considering tossing. After a few hours of this madness, I realized that I needed to trust my instinct, but I also needed to have some rules. I couldn't evaluate every item in my home subjectively. There had to be an objective standard on what we had decided was safe to keep and what wasn't.

The difficulty came as I realized that the question wasn't entirely about safety - it was about worth. There were many items that potentially could be saved, but the process would be time consuming, or costly. We were also looking at months of storage costs on top of the trailer payment and our mortgage and all the rest of it, so some of the things just weren't worth what it would cost to keep them in storage. Black trash bags became my new best friends.