Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing Ashlee Rowland Part III: Overcoming Mold Toxicity

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back with my friend Ashley. Ashley, welcome back.

Thank you for having me again. Round 3.

Round 3. Podcast 3. You had a long story of healing because you had a lot happen in the last several years. Where we left off is we talked about your son's eye, light therapy. Tell us what happened next.

We bought our dream house in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, by the lake, in our dream community, right by our church. All our friends were like within a mile radius of us, and it was a cute 1910 home. We had it inspected for mold and, you know, all of the due diligence on that. Had like the original arches and just like really beautiful, uh, and they used to still build things beautifully instead of like kind of sterile and whatever. Yes. As now. So we got this house and we moved in. It was shortly after Hollis had gotten attacked by the rooster. And I had just found out I was pregnant with Wilder. And so we moved into this house and it was, it was fall, summer, fall. So we were still outside a lot. We were, we got to work in the yard. We, it was just like the house was kind of trashed. And so we got to repaint the house and we used like all the non-toxic paint and we redid the inside. We redid the backyard and garden and Lawn and all of that. And so then anyways, summer turns into fall as it does, and we turn inside more as you do when the weather changes. And as that happened, odd symptoms started to appear that, you know, we were chalking up to stress of what had happened with Hollis. Um, I was freshly pregnant. We're inside more now, so we're not as, you know, we don't have the resources of the sun and summer and being at the lake and being outside 24/7. And so it was all chalked up to that. But long story short, we had these really odd symptoms that we'd never had before, like recurrent sinus infections for me, like so weird. My, my immune system must be so bogged down from the stress. And then Hollis, all of his lymph nodes turned to rock, like so rock hard. And I'm like, this kid's never been sick in his life. And he started getting ear infections. He's never had ear— like he's never been sick. He's a home birth, raw milk drinking, breastfed, liver eating baby. Like he was just healthy. And then what really tipped me over the edge is Tommy. It was January, it was, uh, 10 days before Wilder was born and he got a necrotizing infection in his mouth. That was— the fear was that it was gonna travel to his brain and potentially kill him. And I'm like 9 months pregnant. Hollis is sick with ear infections. What the heck's going on? We're super stressed still and dysregulated from what had happened with the rooster and all those ups and downs. And Tommy has this necrotizing, bleeding gums. His gums are being eaten away by something. We try everything natural, holistic that I possibly can. We're doing homeopathy, we're doing herbs, we're doing everything. So then we, we are really concerned. He has like an extremely high, like 105 fever, and it's been over 3 days at this point. He's on the ground sleeping and he's sweating. He's changing his clothes 10 times a night because he's just breaking into sweats and like super weird. So call in the big guns, the pharma guns. And so we get on a concierge call with someone at like midnight. We find someone in our community and I remember I was texting you as well, but then the time changes. It's like, you know, 10 and it's like 2 AM where you are, whatever. So I have someone come and give him IV, like Myers cocktail, IV methylene blue, IV ozone, like all these things and nothing's touching it. They, our friend brings over pot gummies. Oh, he's never done any kind of drug in his whole life. And they were just like a high THC gummy to try to help and nothing happened. He's like, I kind of wanted it to happen so I could felt some relief. Bringing over mushroom tinctures and this tincture and that tincture. And so we get him, um, a compounding pharmacy makes him up this horrible, disgusting Magic Mouthwash or something it's called. Yes.

That's what we call it.

Oh my God. So he's swishing with that, but then the second he starts swishing, his gums just start bleeding even worse. So we can't do that. Oh my gosh. So, I mean, it, it's horrible. And we end up putting him on even like antibiotics, which, what? Ashley is doing this? And antivirals, antibact— they didn't know. So they put him on all the things. Eventually, he misses Hollis's third birthday. He can't go because he's just sleeping, dying on the ground. And I'm like, oh my God, is he going to die right before we have our baby? And then, you know, he starts to heal. His body starts to heal somehow. I can't fully remember. Maybe it was all the things and none of the things, and I don't know, but he starts to heal. And at that point he has to go and get debridement of his gums to get off all of that gum tissue. It was so bad that we took him into the dental office and the assistant wouldn't even touch him. She's like, if I even touch him, he's just gonna bleed horribly from the mouth. So they just red laser his gums and send us home. And they have to do a few treatments like that before they can do the debridement, before they can clean out the necrotizing mouth thing that happened. And it was then that I was like, something is really weird. This like doesn't just happen to people. The, basically the diagnosis that they were giving him was a NUG, a necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis or something that homeless AIDS patients get.

So let me jump in here. I remember this only vaguely. I was very busy with patients. And so you guys were sort of texting me as friends and I don't even know if I had my Idaho license back then. I have it now.

Have you ever seen this? I was like sending you pictures.

I just remember thinking, this is weird. Why are they sick? I don't know if we ever talked about it. We may never have connected over this, but one of the first things I think when somebody who particularly like in the practice, we've got, you know, Andrew Laubacher's podcast, Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. We cover his run-in with mold. His health deteriorated and I immediately zeroed in on mold. We immediately identified it. We immediately did some testing, turned it around right away. It's always like one of the first things on the list and it is horrible. And I, you know, you didn't really give me at the time a clear enough picture of how terrible this was.

Seeing his gums, I'm like, what is this?

First of all, I'd never seen that. Second, it's just so unusual for a young man to have a gum issue that isn't knocked out with tooth brushing, cessation of bad lifestyle habits, which are not even in the picture for him.. And you know, a little mouthwash. So very strange story. I think that's why at the time I remember what testing I wanted. I, I, I remember the testing I asked for was pretty extensive and I was looking for kind of weird things.

Yeah. And we did the whole gamut. And so basically, long story short, before we purchased the home, we had it tested for mold and there was a small patch of black mold that was remediated.

How did you test it?

We had it inspected. And then the inspectors, which are a complete joke, just so everybody on this podcast knows, inspectors, mold remediators, maybe one in 1 million isn't— there are some good ones out there, but for the most part, they are simply uneducated beyond this is mold, I'm going to bleach it, I'm going to scrub it, I'm going to sand it. They do not understand the health implications of mold. Just like laying that out there. We had them inspect it. They found mold because I said, this is a 1910 home. There's no mold in Idaho. Yes, there is. Like, let's, to be honest, it's negative 20 degrees outside and it's 80 degrees inside from the heater, from the fireplace. Like there's mold. So they test, they find the mold. So then part of our closing is they have to remediate the mold. So they have a company, they hire a company that remediates the mold and they sign the certificate and we have, cool, we're good. I have that in the back of my mind knowing that there was mold and it was remediated, which I'm a skeptic about that kind of stuff because I'm like, do people actually understand this? That's all in the back of my mind the whole time. And I'm, Tommy, are you sure there's no mold? We had it tested. We have the certificate. We have it remediated, blah, blah, blah. So then, you know, 3 days later, I think Tommy heals, and either 3 days or 2 days or 1 day, I don't know, Wilder's born. He comes 10 days early at our house. Okay. So he's born frank breech at home, meaning his butt came out first, and we didn't know he was frank breech. It's actually illegal to deliver a breech baby at home in Idaho. We didn't know he was breech. So he must have flipped. So baby comes. And babies are not born sick unless something is terribly wrong, and he was born sick. He was so swollen and inflamed. We had to take him into the bathroom and simulate, like, a steam room every night, 5 times a night, for this little baby to be able to breathe. And we're doing facial massage and we're rubbing his lymph nodes, and I look at Tommy and I'm like, "There is mold in this house. Climb up in the attic right now." He climbs up. Where this company remediated the mold, full of mold. They never remediated it. There's no way they could have remediated it because the hole in which they would have had to crawl up into to remediate it was too small for them to get into. Like physically the wall would have had to been cut back in order for them to go in. So then I order the dust test before I bring in like an IEP and pay like tens of grand, you know, whatever. I'm just going to test and see if there's mycotoxins in the home. So a friend comes over, I'm freshly postpartum. I'm like one day postpartum at this point. I'm holding my baby and he's sick and Hollis is sick and Tommy's sick and I'm sick. I remember being in labor with a sinus infection and the birth actually like took it away from me. I don't know, somehow, cuz I remember trying to breathe in through my nose and I couldn't, but somehow in that time of the birth, um, that went away, all the hormones and all the oxytocin and all the things, I'm sure. And so a friend comes over and I'm like, I'm like, swab this, swab that, whatever. She packages up, sends it in. 7 days later, my mother-in-law's at our house visiting our baby and the tests come back. And I, I just remember being in shock, in awe at the levels at which the mold came back in our home. Basically, here's the worst home and it's your home. This is the worst home we've ever seen. So then I'm, you guys know, we've talked about this before. I'm an extremist. Doesn't stress me out. It's just the way I am. I have a newborn baby and I say, all right, babe, we're moving out. He's like, what do you mean we're moving out? It's a blizzard outside. I'm like, well, we either find somewhere else to live or I'm going and sleeping in a tent in our backyard. It's cold. It's winter. We have sheepskin rugs. We'll be fine. People used to do it all of our lives. Like, I'm not spending another night in this house. But let's move to the guest room. I'm like, Tommy, do you not understand mold? Mold doesn't just not go into the guest room. I'm like trying to explain. It's like odorless vapor. Like you can't see it. You can't feel it. You can't— it's like if somebody blows their cigarette smoke on you and then dissipates like it's still there trying to explain this to him. He's just not getting it. Well, we'll go to this room, we'll tarp it off, we'll vacuum it. I just eventually told him, I said, I love you more than life, but me and my boys, me and our boys, we're leaving. And if you want to stay here in this moldy house, you can. I knew he'd come with me, so that's why I said that. So then we moved into our van, which was in the driveway of our house in the dead of winter. We had a heater running so we could stay warm and keep the baby warm and keep ourselves warm. But for me, it's not an option to stay in an environment that is killing me. I would rather go and live out in the woods. People always have excuses. I can't move out. I can't pay this. I can't be— you can, but you get to choose whether or not you want to. For me, it was a priority. I know that I wouldn't be able to heal and get my baby better if I didn't leave the environment, even if they remediated it.

I have a colleague, I remember sitting with him in his office. He's saying, I got a consult in a couple minutes, you know, go sort of go amuse yourself while I take this consult. I said, what's the consult? He says, well, it's a woman with mess-like symptoms. She's been seeing me for years, spends all this money with us. I I keep telling her it's her moldy house, but she doesn't want to leave her fashionable neighborhood and her dream home. And I keep trying to tell her, you're just throwing good money after bad. And it is amazing how stubborn people will get about their homes, their cars, their offices. This hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure one day I will tell someone they need to leave their boat. Maybe not. There's a lot of fresh air on the ocean. But my point is people, they don't want to face the music. And the craziest piece of it is how much better people get when they get out of the moldy environment, so long as they then just follow a proven game plan and system to get the mold toxins out, which is a big part of what we do. We do this a lot in the practice. We don't advertise for mold toxicity, but we have tons of people who come in who've been exposed. And to a certain extent, many people who we don't know what the cause of their illness— it may have been historical exposure, we don't know— but I know what we do works for that. And it's so important to get them out of the, out of the building, because if they won't do it frequently, we just make no progress. Money just gets thrown away.

If you don't leave the environment in which you got sick, how do you expect to heal? Maybe you'll take a step forward and then you're going to be taking 5 back every day. Like you're waking up being dragged back. And so for us, we just bought our dream home. My baby was born in it. We were in our dream neighborhood. All of our mattresses are organic wool and all wood. We don't have plastic in our home. So there was nothing that we got to keep. I had just bought these chairs. Beautiful handmade in LA wool and linen chairs that were $10,000. I didn't get them for $10,000. I found them for cheaper than that. I had to throw them away. I had to throw them away because that fabric is completely penetrable. There was no remediating it based on the levels that— obviously, I don't want people to come on this and be like, oh my God, I have to throw away everything and burn my house down. Our levels were exceptionally horrible.

Although to be on the safe side, that would be the most secure Just kidding. Just kidding.

I mean, I have no attachment. I'm not a sentimental person, so I don't have attachment to things. I'm like, oh, this is making me sick. Goodbye. I literally don't care. I don't care if it was my grandma's mom's cousin. I don't care. It's making me sick. And so what the levels that came back were, you know, warranted enough concern that we then hired an IEP and we hired a bunch of additional people to come in, additional inspectors to come in and confirm this you know, there's no way this was ever remediated. There's cobs of cobwebs up here. There's dust. There's no footprints in the dust. Like, you know, what's going on? Or whatever their situation was. But the secondary issue was the bacteria in the home. So the mold had caused a major bacterial issue, and that's what we're assuming happened to Tommy's mouth is this bacterial thing. So to give people an example, the level of bacteria that you would safely want in your home of this specific bacteria that I can't remember the name of is less than 1 $63 million. So that's a lot. And no wonder we had so many health issues. And so literally we moved out of our home that day. You'd think the rapture came, like Lord Jesus came and lifted us up. Like our clothes are on the floor. Our groceries were still kind of out on the counter that were like non-perishables because we thought they're just going to come intermediate the house. We're going to move back in. Little did we know we've never moved back into that home ever again. We'd have to pay $100 grand to remediate that home out of our pocket. And that we would, after it was remediated, get it tested again and sell it.

Tell us the story. You move into the van and then what happens?

Move into the van. Then Tommy understands I'm serious. So then we're, um, we're, we're in the van. We're staying with friends. We're telling people what happened. Friends are letting us stay with them. We're with my mom. I'm like, we have to get to the sun. We have to get as close to the equator at to this point as possible because I knew that we needed the resources. At that point, we were so sick that we, we did truly need more than what we could get in the north. It's not that it's cold, the sun isn't out, whatever they've done with weather modification, it's cloudy 24/7 and it's not snowing, it's raining. So I'm like, I know that we're completely $100,000 in debt now and all these things from Hollis's medical debt and the mold debt, but like we have to conjure up somehow to get Arizona, California, somewhere, somewhere closer to the sun.

Can you unpack that for a minute? Because you don't just move into your van and go $100 grand in debt. What was the exact sequence of events that $100,000 went out the door? And I'm also curious if you can unpack, because I know this comes up and we're going through this now with our boy who's out of the hospital now 6 or 7 months. How did the money go out the door for Hollis's care? And then how did it go out the door for the mold? And what was sort of the sequence of events where you realized, oh, we really have to spend this money?

Yeah. So basically with Hollis, Um, his emergency surgery was $36,000 for just the emergency surgery on his eye. We had been like working hard, saving, saving, saving. We had like a pretty good cushion of money. We were saving. We bought our house, that drained a lot of it, but we still had some. So as these events came, we paid for things as we could. And then, you know, we'd kind of replenish, pay for things as we could.

Hollis's medical bills that you were billed $36,000. You had a healthcare sharing ministry. I don't know if you care to talk about which one.

Yeah. If, when you have a Christian healthcare sharing. It's kind of convoluted, but essentially how it works is you pay out of pocket, they reimburse. And so we paid everything out of pocket until like we drained ourselves, essentially knowing that we would get reimbursed, but we are still receiving reimbursements from Hollis's medical care. That was over 2 years ago. It normally doesn't take that long for general things, but it was convoluted. There was, it's a big bill. We're trying to negotiate with the hospitals.

How did you negotiate?

I'm like, $36,000? Are you kidding me? I'm not paying that. Like, that's kind of how I am. So I call and I'm like, is there a cash discount? Is there a discount if we do it by then? Is this, this? There's no way that this little antibiotic ointment is $700. I'm not paying for that. I didn't even ask for it. You guys just gave it to me. Okay, we'll take that off. We'll lower this. Oh, all of a sudden, oh, now your bill's only $1,000. What? What do you mean?

The markup is insane.

It's the medical system. They bring it down significantly. So for anyone on here, challenge your medical bills because if you just pay 'em, just pay 'em.

This has become easier than ever with AI. I will go to my favorite AI, which is Perplexity, and I will just say, hey, what's a reasonable cost for X, Y, and Z thing? And it will spit it back out to me. And it is, gives you a range. You can ask by zip code, which it does vary based on zip code for various reasons. Very helpful, especially for the negotiation piece of it.

Because then you're not like, well, I want to pay $1,000. They're like, well, the reasonable cost is actually like $12,000. Not $36 that we billed you or whatever.

The tough thing for them is that all they can do is send you to collections. And while that is not an ideal outcome, the reality is they don't have any leverage other than that. If you just make them an offer where they can stay in business, they'll probably take it.

They don't want to go to collections and all that either. It's a nightmare. The amount of calls we are making with negotiating the bills and then they're like, okay, we're going to put your account on hold so you don't get taken to collections, but then we get taken to collections anyways. Then we have to call collections and they have to take us off collections. It's an absolute nightmare and it makes you just wish you had the $36,000 and just pay and be done with it. That's the point of the system. You know, we were able to kind of get through that and we're slowly making the money back from that. But then Tommy's medical bills quickly built up too from— we're going to the dentist, we're working with the concierge, we're ordering the medicines, we're taking them in.

Did any of these people mention mold?

No, not a single person. And anyone that I would say, I think it's mold, they say, you know, kind of like, Okay, you're one of those people.

I have just learned the hard way that it can always be mold. It can always be mold.

Because when you have poor building etiquette—

Even with good builders, the reality is just things fall apart. Things fall apart. And modern, modern building materials are designed to be as cheap and aesthetically pleasing as possible. And drywall is the greatest mold food ever invented by humanity. And it's what all of our homes are interiorly done with. And it hides everything. It hides all the pipes, which can leak or burst.

Yeah. And I like that you brought that up because something that is really important is that I'm very holistic in all things that I do. And so for me, even though I knew mold was in our home and it was literally killing us, I'm like, why is the mold here? And that leads into the conversation you're talking about. The mold is in there and where is it growing? It's growing all over what you just called the drywall, the plywood. It is trying to eat away because those things are off-gassing. Those things are off-gassing, off-gassing, off-gassing, and the mold is there to do its job to break down material that is, that is also harmful for your health. So like there's mold that makes you sick, but then there's like the off-gassing of these toxic building materials. That's more of a silent killer, like more so than mold. And so there is a place for it in, you know, the ecosystem, but that's not— people will then go so far like, oh, there's a place for it. Yeah. But it can still make you sick. Like we, you know, we can't diminish that fact. It's a, it's a foreign organism that literally goes and can grow inside of your body. It's not just this vapor that's in and then it's out. No, it sequesters in the tissues. And so it's so important to note that yes, if you open the can of worms with mold, you're opening the can of worms and there's gonna have to be action that's taken or there's gonna have to be very clear evidence that's ignored. Those are the two choices you have. You get to remain ignorant and ignore it and remain sick. Or you get to take very clear action. And we took very clear action. So we moved into our van at this point. So our mortgage on our house in Coeur d'Alene was $4,000 a month. We bought when it was high interest rate. So every month we're flushing $4,000 down the drain and hoping the next is the one we get to move back in.

You're building equity, Ashley.

Yeah. Building equity, getting good credit scores. Anyway, so that's $4,000 a month. And then we also have like the other, you know, property taxes, whatever. And then we're also now at this point renting, we have to rent, we have to find somewhere else to live. So we're renting. So we're now paying our $4,000 month mortgage with a $3,000, because rent isn't cheap. So now we're paying like double to have these two homes. The one that we just loathe at this point, we hate this house. We— why did this happen? This is the dumbest thing that happened. We're like in the super negative downward spiral mindset. And then the medical bills start, continue compiling. So when I was in the house, I was so like having such weird symptoms. I went to the ER like 3 times because I was afraid I was miscarrying. So then those medical bills come in. So it was just this cascade of medical bills, medical bills, medical bills until we were completely wrung out at this point. We had nothing left. And so we had to take out credit cards and the mold remediation company requires they get paid. So we paid them what we could with all our cash that we had, but then there was still leftover amount. Like I said, it was about $100,000. And so we took out a zero interest credit card that was zero interest for what, 12 months or whatever. We're like anti-credit card people, but there, there truly was no other option. We either sell the home infested with mold and basically lower the value of it that much and then have to pay the bank that much when we sell it. So we still have to figure it out or we take out the credit cards and do what we do and we hustle and we make it work. And so we get, it's a 20% interest credit card with $80,000 on it. That's a lot of money. One month out from when that first interest payment's going to come, we have to make a hard choice. We have to sell our beloved van, our completely organic, non-toxic van we built with wool and non-toxic building supplies and all these things, we have to sell it. Like, I wanted to bring that van all over and raise my kids in it. We had to sell it. And that money that we sold the van went and it literally paid for all that credit card debt that night. It was like 2 days later that the first 20% interest would've come out. But the money that was going out is the medical bills, the supplements, the consultations with doctors, then nutritionists, then the IEP and, and then the IEP does something else. Then they have their person. It was just like, we're just writing checks all day long for this money pit home. So we remediate the home because people are like, just sell the home with mold. Someone will remediate it or people don't care. I'm like, I can't do that. I cannot sell this death home to someone else for their family to move into because there's two things that they're going to do. They're going to pay to remediate it, which yes, pleased that they would do that. But a lot of people don't care about mold. And I know that someone had moved in that home because there wasn't one visible sign of mold in our home. It was white, it was clean. There was no bubbling paint. There was no water intrusion. There was no stains. There was no marks. There was no smell. There was no soft wood. There was no visible sign of mold in our home. And if someone goes in it, oh, maybe the mold isn't that bad. Maybe that family was just sensitive and they don't remediate it and their kids get sick. I couldn't do that. So I don't care how much money I had to spend. I had to remediate the home. We sold the home all crystal clear. I'm like, this is the cleanest home in all Coeur d'Alene, things that we had done to this home. Okay. We had it done with botanical cleansers and replaced the wood. We, we had to drop the entire ceiling. I mean, like, it was ridiculous. They were first, they were going to take off the roof, all these things, but the home is clean. We know the family that bought it is safe and healthy. And I don't care how much debt I have to go into that. I can, money always comes. You can always make more and you can always pay it off. But we ended up paying the people to buy our house. So people are like, oh, you made some money on the house. No, at closing we ended up writing a check for those people to buy the house. It was unbelievable. But then we're out. And so now we're out of the house. The house is sold, gone. This was just so you guys know, this was over a year. So we ended up paying $48,000 of mortgage to an empty home that we never got to live in. We only lived in our house for 6 months that we bought. And, um, after that it was more of just the mind game at this point. We're sick, we're moldy, our symptoms, they're worse. We're this, we're that, you know, and you, you get sick and you stay sick. And there, there was a day that I just looked at Tommy and I said, you know what, babe? I think we're healed. I think that we're keeping ourselves sick at this point because we had been in such a sick mindset for 2 years at that point. And I said, we're healed. I had to come out of this extreme fight or flight mindset, like so sympathetic driven, any noise, any bang, any, any bonk, any— I was just completely overdriven on the ground shaking. I couldn't function. I, it was, it was ridiculous. The amount of like mental strain that that took on me.

You didn't mention what you guys did, cuz I assume you found the mold, realized it was a problem. What all did you do aside from what you already mentioned with Tommy acutely? As soon as you knew there was mold, what did you do to detox? And what did you find helpful specifically?

As we've talked about in previous conversations, even with something as serious as mold, I know in my years of practice, innate, like knowing with my body is I don't wanna push, force, shove, anything like that. So we're not doing any detoxes, we're not doing any cleanses. We're gonna build, build, build, build because I want my cells to do the job always. I want my systems to do the job always. I don't ever wanna be doing the job for them because normally when we try to override something in our body with our own, there's some kind of things that happen in the crossfires and I didn't want that. We were already too sick. We couldn't deal with detox reactions or pushes or cleanses. So we stuck with the basics that we always do. Eating nose to tail gelatin and collagen-rich foods and raw milk, local, 100% local seasonal herbal teas, things I had preserved, just continuing on those. So we know we had that basic, but we did employ a strong supplement regimen at this point. So we're not like really supplement-heavy people, but we ran, um, the Mycotox, the OTE, you know, we ran all these different tests and we were so depleted. Our mycotoxic levels were so horrible, so high. And so I looked at specific nutrients that would target, you know, like rebuilding antioxidants that are, or nutrients that are killed off by this kind of chytomium or OTA or Aspergillus or whatever, whatever's going on. And so we built up specifically with those things. A lot of that is like, normally I'm like a whole food vitamin C kind of person. We were high dose ascorbic acid, which people are like, what? There's a time and place. And we were, um, we took the herb route. So there's like an herb route or a supplement route. Normally that you can go herb or nutrient route. So naturally we went herb route. So we did everything we could herb route. We weren't doing like tons of B, C, A, like we were just going the herb route because I love herbs. They work really synergistically with our body, with my family's body. That's what we're used to. So we employed lots of specific herbs that are antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal. They're gonna help with repairing the gut lining. They're gonna help with the integrity of the mucosal, you know, like all of those things.. And so we employed this supplement and herb and nutrient regimen with the help of one of my really good friends who is an absolute mold expert. Love her. Her name's Rachel. She's, she's brilliant. So she's a building biologist. She's an IEP. She's a nutritionist. She's a mold consultant. She's brilliant. And she's brilliant because her family all almost died from mold. That's when you become an expert. And so we put our hand, our lives in her hands, and I trusted her more than anything. So she helped us. Based on the knowledge we already had, based on, you know, what she knew I'm gonna do or not gonna do, she recommended things and we synergistically created, she would create like phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. And me being me, I'd kind of do them not really phase 1, phase 2, phase 3. I would just do them more instinctively. And within 7 months, which is unheard of, we got back clear mycotox panels completely. And that is a praise God moment because when there's there's nature and there's trust in your body and there's intuition, but then clinically, scientifically being able to see the results, the fruit of your labor is really rewarding and confirming. And there's a need for this, like what you do in your practice. You're seeing the data, you're seeing, wow, this patient's getting better. Obviously they're feeling better, but like right here on paper, they're getting better. Cuz we know those things are snapshot in time, but they're also alluding to the overall health of the body. So all of us were able to heal, be supported without any— people are like, did you do heavy metal cleanses and parasite cleanses. And no, like, we didn't do any of that. We built up our bodies, we supported our bodies, and then we then dealt mostly now at that point with the nervous system. We, we really had to work on nervous system at that point of just believing, okay, it's okay if there's a cough, it's okay if there's a sneeze. We're humans. It's, you know, our neighbor's mowing their lawn and there's pollen and our bodies are still a little depleted. And so we need to work on that. But I had to really shift out of that mindset and choose to believe that we were healed. And because people will get mold sick and they'll stay mold sick for the rest of their lives, even though they're not actually mold sick, like mold sick in their brains. So not like moldy brains, but like in their minds.

I got my first experience in integrative functional medicine in practice at a functional medicine mold Lyme clinic. And I noticed that the people who didn't do the fundamentals, light, water, earthing, all the things we talk about a lot in our social media, free educational materials, Those people had the worst outcomes. They often wouldn't recover at all. It was ironically the older people who had these more old-timey habits. They would walk, they would exercise outside, they would not be stuck to their phone or their laptop. And this was almost 10 years ago now that I'm talking about. It's gotten even worse. So I'm not surprised you bounced back that fast. What are your top 3 herbs? And then I want to ask you about light therapy for mold, because you've told me in conversations offline that you saw huge improvements with products we, we know and love.

Yeah. Right away. We didn't know at that point, but we had been, we had been putting on the patches and, and then once we did learn about them, we started more strategically using them, but those played an absolute massive role in our healing. I mean, it's just like with how sick we were, these are the common things that we are told by doctors or asked. So how long have each of you been hospitalized? Because they ask, like expecting, knowing that you've been hospitalized. I'm like, We haven't, we haven't been hospitalized. They're like, they were just shocked based on these levels and based on what's in your blood and based on what's in your body. There's no way you guys haven't been hospitalized, especially your babies. When they see our new results, they're like, so was this exposure, you know, 5, 10 years ago? I'm like, no, this was like less than a year ago. Couldn't believe the rate at which a lot of just like, wow, we can't believe you healed this fast. And wow, we've never seen someone heal this fast clinically. For me, I've never really seen a client heal and it takes about 2 years for them to get like a clean mycotox test back.

I've heard that as well from one of the leading experts.

Yeah. And same with my friend Rachel. Same. She was, she's like, oh my God, guys, this is unbelievable.

Which patches did you use?

X39 was the base, Aeon, and then very slowly glutathione. So we did all the detox, all the things, light, the nutrition, the being in the sun, getting our feet on the earth. No EMF. And then we stuck with the mental side of things. Like I'm still stuck really badly in the PTSD. I can't handle anything. I have no resilience, no capacity for anything to possibly go wrong. It was day 12 of wearing the Aeon X39 together, specifically strategically trying to, you know, experiment with them. Just in an instant, I woke up one morning and my nervous system was parasympathetic. I could feel it for the first time. Nothing else I had done. I had tried box breathing, breathwork, EMDR, story work. PTSD counselors, all these things, nothing helped with the nervous system. I was so, I was so burnt out from what had happened to Hollis, what had happened to Tommy, and what had happened to Wilder, and now what had happened with the mold. And 12 days in, and finally the parasympathetic response from the patches. I always tell people you have to look into these patches with the things I shared. And then, so the herbs that we love the most, milky oats, um, was really helpful for nervous system and it's a very calming herb. And so everyone would get the milky, milky oats. Obviously when I say everyone, Wilder was a newborn at this point. I actually created the mold course. So it's the Holistic Mold Protocol and that broke down like exactly what we did for a newborn, for a toddler, for my husband, and for me. Me when I was pregnant, me when I was postpartum, breaks down all of it. And it, it's, it's the exact framework we went through that got us from absolutely mold poisoned at month 1 to a clear mold test month 7.

Hang on. Milky oats is not an herb I'm familiar with.

Like really fresh pods that are on the top. And so when they're fresh, you harvest them and you make the tincture from them.

Oh, it's a tincture.

We were doing oats in the form of tinctures, whether they were like alcohol-based, glycerin-based, and then we were doing like loose leaf herbs. That was the main way we were doing herbs. So we would do like a half a gallon every day of a tea that had rose hips because we are in the north. So we're very big on seasonal biocompatibility with ourselves. And so for me it doesn't make sense to have camu camu and acerola cherry when those are tropical things when I'm in the north in the winter. So we do things like rosehip because that's the north's version of vitamin C. And then we had, uh, sea buckthorn because that's another northern thing, like kind of like the northern version of citrus rather than lemon or orange. And then we had huckleberries and blueberries and all the berries that we had dried from season that we put in these teas. And then there's a tea, it's called cystis tea. Cystus is very, very high in nutrients in general, but it's antimicrobial. And so it's just like this powerhouse herb. And so we'd have cystus tea every day and we'd feel the difference. So cystus tea, milky oats, and then what was the other main one that we did?

Remember it and then maybe we'll post it in the show comments.

That's a great idea. We'll, we'll post it for everyone.

And we need a link to your mold course. Appreciate people's purchases. You fuel our content habit and all the great content we put out. Thank you for your purchases.

Yes. That was the, the mold protocol basically outlines what we did. It was very like herbal, homeopathic, gentle. And like I say, it covers, it covers every demographic except for the elderly. We had a husband, we had a wife, we had a baby, we had a newborn, we had a pregnant woman, we had a postpartum woman, we had a breastfeeding woman. So all these things we did were like hitting all those majors. Is it safe for? Just supporting our bodies in that. And then starting to see symptoms going away and then being like now in a state rather than survival of like trying vitality and resilience and choosing to be in that. So I think for anyone listening, you come face to face with the mold and you have the two choices. You ignore it and pretend it's not there and you stay sick, or you face it and it costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of damages and it costs a lot of heartache and it costs a lot of time. Um, but you have to, like, that's just what you're faced with. If you're lucky enough to be a renter, you don't have to deal with a lot of that, but we are homeowners. And so we had to, we had to pay every penny ourselves and our insurance wouldn't touch it. And then you get to the next step of, okay, So now it's time to support our bodies. So instead of we're supporting them, like we need to heal from the mold, let's support our bodies because then a lot of other things will also go well. It's not just about killing the mold and killing, killing, killing. Like we don't need to worry about that. And then you get to a point of where you finally feel supported and then you get to make the conscious realization because we have to bring things like into the conscious of, well, I'm actually healing and I'm moving forward. I'm not stuck sick. I'm not going to be like treating mold for the rest of my life. Same with autoimmunity. I'm not going to be, oh, I have lupus. I'm just going to It's part of me. I'm going to treat lupus for the rest of my life. No, that's behind me. And you know, the last thing I wanted to do was create a mold course, but I felt I was very, very clearly told by God one day, you need to create a mold course. And I was like, no, no thanks. I don't really want to revisit that, especially this fresh, like it's pretty fresh open wound still. And he's like, you need to create a mold course because you're going to help a lot of people. And so I created the mold course. And so the mold course is there, but it shows people like an A to Z. Do this and be done with it. Don't stay in this forever. Because then I realized, oh my gosh, we are healed. I've just kept us here because we were like stuck in this sick mentality. And when friends would talk to us, how you guys doing? How are you? It was like we carried this weight of like oppression with us. Can we make you guys meals? And we got to the point of we're like, we just want to move so nobody knows what happened to us so people can't feel bad for us all the time because it just kept bringing it back in. And like, our friends were the sweetest, and they let us stay with them, let us live with them, cooked us meals, brought us things, watched the kids so we could do the calls. And but it's like, we had to physically then leave the town, the physical space, the dream town, and move because it just carried such a heavy weight. Now that we can return to— and when our friends, how are you guys? Oh my God, we're amazing. This is this, this, this. We get to talk about life, we get to talk about normal things instead of Yeah, we've just had, you know, Hall's got the rooster attack and then the mold and then Wilder was sick and then Tommy almost died and then bills and now we're in debt and, you know, it was just this cascade of negativity and we get to choose to leave that or to stay in it. And some people will choose to stay in it because it's like they're high and they love it and it kind of like is their thing they get to do all the time. Yes. And I would not to do that.

It's so, so interesting to me that very frequently patients will get significant improvement with us. And then at some point they'll relapse and we'll always revisit why. And almost always they've gone back to things that we had told them to cut out in their healing journey. And it's a lot of it is about the comfort of where you were and not wanting permanent change, which is necessary for genuine, deep, lasting healing. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a pleasure as always. We'll include links to everything we mentioned here. Of course, where can people learn more about you? And everything that you're doing.

Yeah. So Simple Holistic is my brand. We just got a fresh up. I'll send you some of the stuff after. It's like our happy, we're healed, we're here, we're here to help, you know, vibe situation going on. And so Leland always makes fun of how I talk. But yeah, we're so very excited and, um, Simple Holistic is where we are. We have the other two podcasts. If you guys haven't listened to those, go listen to those. Get the full story. And like Leland said, we'll get you guys the links and get you all taken care of. And if you want the mold course, get you his link. Yeah. Just sending you guys off with hope for healing, everyone.

Thank you all for joining us. Have a great day. And again, Ashley, thank you for joining me.