Tag mold

My Iced Coffee isn’t the same as yours…

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One Cup at a Time. My love for Coffee.

I didn’t like coffee at all until I was in my mid 20s and I had a friend bring me a “crappuccino” (my favorite term for cappuccino from a gas station machine). I ran around feeling super zoned and focused until the crash, and then I experienced the craving again. I fell in love.

Tie Dye Tumbler!

Actually, I had an affinity for coffee dating back to my childhood. The smell of fried bacon, eggs, and coffee radiating from the kitchen of my grandfather’s house in Kentucky. Vividly, I can remember those smells. I don’t know why but the SMELL of coffee would wake me up in the morning, it was the indicator that my parents were awake. Then, when I was old enough to figure out how to make the coffee, if I was up before them, I’d make it but never consumed it, that stuff was disgusting. Until that fateful “crappuccino” and then I was doomed, what was this life-changing deliciousness?

Little did I know that I had been slowly poisoning myself, and when I was in my most toxic flare of Mast Cell, it became very apparent that I couldn’t drink it anymore. I was ADDICTED… everything in my life revolved around whether or not I had my coffee. No one could speak to me until I had my first cup, and when I say first cup, I had a 42 oz tumbler, full of iced coffee. I would drink three of them a day! My iced coffee is not the same as yours, I promise you that. I had become a full-blown barista in my home. I had a coffee press, an espresso pot that you use on the stove, a Keurig, and eventually I learned how to COLD BREW straight up espresso. You name it, I could make it, and would if my heart desired it that day.

Handy Cold Brew Pitcher!

If the coffee in my cup couldn’t “grow hair on your chest”, it went back down the drain. I was at the point, that some of the BIGGEST chain coffee places were “okay” but still too weak for my blood. If my blood didn’t look like coffee, smell like coffee, something was really wrong. Until they actually pulled a vile of blood out one day that literally looked like left over coffee ground goo….I swore to them, “I swear I do not have a coffee IV at home, although I wish.” (They never did figure out exactly why I had alien blood that day, but it made me take a step back and look at my diet.) My addiction was actually adding to my demise.

Remember mold and yeast had infiltrated my body. Little did I know that in the U.S. they ALLOW a certain level of mold and such to infiltrate our food. It’s on the FDA website, there’s actually a scale they measure it by. For each cup of coffee I was drinking I was actually ingesting even more mold. I needed the caffeine to operate, without the benefits of the caffeine, my body just was blah, I had to eventually resort to the Green Coffee Bean Extract, because I couldn’t have the other stuff. Follow this link, if you need to have a little pick me up, with polyphenol benefits every morning without the crash! They sit out and the sun to mold before they are roasted, this is not conducive to someone now allergic to ALL THE MOLD.

I resorted to buying imported European Coffee from Amazon, to start weaning myself off of coffee, and then I went on the hunt for whatever beverage I could drink that I wasn’t allergic to or had a reaction to. Apparently in Europe, they don’t ALLOW contaminates or mold in their food, Go figure! Water even gives me heartburn. Literally learned how to Cold Brew the Coffee in my own fridge for 24 hours so that it didn’t heat up the coffee and pull the oils out of the bean. It’s the only way I can drink it from a drive thru place. The oils in the coffee bean are the most reactive and hold the most mold content, so if it’s brewed with hot water, I can’t have it. Talk about shell shock to my system. My kids would regularly warn people, including my caretaker, “Take away her coffee, and someone is going to die.” *I giggle at this because really it’s not true, but I’d get pretty darn defensive and grumpy. No one actually died, I promise.*

I guess what really got me was the cups I was using was also an issue I had discovered early on my coffee venture, to make sure I wasn’t poisoning myself indirectly. I figured out that the rubber grommets around the top of the cup, for no spill cups, they grow mold. And you BEST HAVE A SCRUB BRUSH FOR REUSABLE STRAWS, or just use disposable ones, because honey, those will grow mold too, even if you dishwasher them. Trust me.

Synbiotic Gut Health

Knocking this addiction wasn’t easy, and I ended up replacing it with something that is literally not even worthy of mentioning, it isn’t soda, but it’s an energy drink juice. I’m almost certain that it’s probably not the smartest idea at the moment, but it’s the only thing my body doesn’t have a reaction to, including my bladder. Not everyone is the same. I drink coffee occasionally now, in fact the last time I had decided to enjoy a cup of coffee in a drive thru I regretted it for two days, and I’m sure I probably will never do that again for months.

I plead insanity…Cytokine Storm Mania

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My kids can vouch for me.

Being chronically ill is likened to being traumatized all over again. On top of being a survivor of previous abusive situations, I likened my situation to triggering all of the above all at once. With Mast Cell Activation your body goes into a cytokine storm. When I mentioned being allergic to your bullshit, my bullshit, stress, and all the other junk in between, I wasn’t kidding. It’s true.

Your body has a response mechanism to cytokine storms, and once your mast cells are activated, no matter the mitigating factor, it activates my mast cells as well. Stress me out, and I lose my shit. If my body is in critical attack, I literally lose my shit… sometimes I forget everything, need to sleep, or scream. I really have no control over it. Other times I hyper react, overthink, and literally drive everyone nuts around me talking about a subject matter three or four times until they’re bored. It’s essentially like having ADHD mixed with a good dose of memory loss.

Most of my life it’s been contributed to me being annoying, obnoxious, crazy. Well essentially, I do go crazy a little. When my body is in crisis at the ER, sometimes I can black out and say things I don’t even know I have said. One critical time, the resident doctor feared even coming into the room to talk to me even before I was released.

I had went to an outdoor wedding that day, and I was just not feeling right. My husband and I had left a little early, and I went home to change clothes. Something was brewing and I couldn’t put my finger on it at that moment. I was going to the garage, and had told my husband, I needed to go to the hospital. I made it to the landing in that garage, and bam, total neurological shut down. I could speak, but I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t move my body, arms and legs totally dysfunctional. My caretaker and husband tag teamed picking me up and sort of dragging me to the truck to get me to the hospital. I am ever so grateful for the wonderful family I have in my life.

That was my life changing moment in the ER. My body was overcome by mold and yeast, I was literally foaming at the mouth, the thrush was so bad in my mouth. I had taken 30 Benadryl to keep me alive, because who can freaking afford an EPI Pen at those kinds of prices, and then still have to go to the ER anyway?! It’s highway robbery to try and save your life. I was in anaphylactic shock, and I needed help.

My husband took me to the nearest ER and they stuck me directly in a Covid wing, my body had went into neurological shut down, I seized in their waiting room while checking in, yet they stuck me in a COVID wing! I was furious. As soon as my legs could work again (I’m assuming from ingesting all the Benadryl), I got up out of that bed and told the whole staff to, “Go fuck yourselves.” Not my proudest moment, because they called security and threatened to call the police until they got the IV start out of my arm. I promptly had my husband drive me to the next nearest ER.

That moment was when I really freaked out the resident doctor, and my husband really doesn’t tell me much other than, he said, “You got MEAN.” I had blacked out. The paresthesia in my veins was so bad at that point, that it took them four hours to get the IV in, and when I did “come to life” again, I was confused but not surprised they had me strapped to the bed. The turning point, I had full function of my brain again, for the first time in years, my body fully functioning like normal. I wanted to see the man who listened, and administered the treatment that saved my life that day! It took a GRAND amount of pleading with the nurses “I’m nice again, I promise.” Sheepishly the doctor came in to receive the “thank you” that he so very much deserved and appreciated, then I told him my story, and he told me to write the book.

Apparently, the mold and yeasts had taken over my body! When they Iv’d an antifungal through my veins, everything miraculously came back to me! I don’t knock the medical field in anyway shape or form, but I am a product of being mistreated over and over again, and when I say, “You can fire your doctor!” I damn well mean it! Find the ones who are in the field and ask why they started it in the first place, TO HELP PEOPLE. You treat that first appointment like you are interviewing them. Unless you are in a position you can’t advocate for yourself, NEVER RELENT to just letting them do whatever. FIGHT for yourself and your needs! However, I suggest you do it as nicely as possible. My mother-in-law always told me, “You can catch more bees with honey, than you can with vinegar.” She’s not wrong.

That day was the day, I realized, that there was SOMETHING in my Garage, that was a PROBLEM, and I set out to find why! After all, I had suffered seizures in there, and a concussion… it was time to figure out why my body had neurological problems with my own home.

The MOLD…

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That the darkness brought into my life.

Remember that tornado? Remember the nails it removed from my roof? Well think about that for a minute. Those tiny little nail holes can let in some water over the years. As time progressed, hidden mold began to grow in a wall, that was shared between my garage and bedroom.

Some people in your household can totally be unaffected by things like this, where others will fall down with illness so fast it will make your head spin. That’s me, not that I volunteered for the position, but somehow my susceptibility to neurotoxins is much higher than others in my household.

The science behind my susceptibility is that I’m genetically predisposed to this medical mystery.

Man in protective hazmat suit cleaning mold on the wall illustration

Stachybotrys mold was starting to grow silently hidden without our knowledge. Keep in mind, I had lived nearly 40 years not even knowing I had Mast Cell Activation, but all the signs were there. In fact, it didn’t even have a name until recently. Stachybotrys and aspergillus just happened to be secretly releasing neurotoxins into the air in my home, and no one had a clue this was occurring. It did take two to three years for the accumulation big enough to create a systemic whirlwind of illnesses that made no sense. The battle I was fighting didn’t make sense, but I was begging for my life back one piece at a time, as it was slowly taken from me.