Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing: Ashlee Rowland Part II - Mold, Injury, and Chronic Illness Naturally

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 back with Ashley for another Stories of Hope Stories of Healing podcast. Ashley, thank you for joining me again.

Yeah, thanks for having me again.

So we left off your Story of Hope Story of Healing after you'd become pregnant. And then you guys moved back to Idaho and you guys had something happen with your son, which is where I think we should start today. What was that event? And tell people about it.

So Hollis, who's my oldest, he was 2 years old at this time. And we were— so we hosted these— we organized these events called Help Your Farmer Day. We were all working. And long story short, my little boy got attacked by a rooster. In his eye. Um, we weren't aware that there was a rooster on the grounds, and especially not an aggressive rooster.

And was this just an open farm? There were no fenced-in areas?

So all the animals were behind fences. All the animals were behind fences except for apparently the rooster. We're looking at the little pigs, and then I just literally step maybe less than 10 feet away to the water spigot, and then I hear him screaming. And I look over and I see a rooster, and I see him on the ground covered in blood. And my number one thought is the rooster looks like it's going to attack him again. When I, when I grabbed him, he was covered in blood. So we rush him into the emergency room. They take one look at him and they send us to Spokane. So we then rush him to Spokane and they take one look at him and they call the emergency surgeon. And that night, um, he was under for a 3-hour surgery. He has 16 permanent stitches in his eye. The pressure reading on his eye was zero when they took it.

Uh, they actually worked, which by the way, for people who don't know, means that the eye itself was punctured, the globe of the eye.

Yeah.

And there was no pressure in there and you would need the fluid in there in order to be able to see and for the eye to function, to heal. So permanent stitches. Interesting. Okay.

What happened next? Permanent stitches. Um, yeah, 16 permanent stitches in the eye. In addition to, I think he had like 20 other stitches that were dissolvable in the eyelid on the outer parts of the eye. His eye was full of blood. We at this point weren't sure if the retina was damaged. They said he would be 9 surgeries away from vision. It was 9, 9 surgeries away from vision.

9 different surgeries, different days, different induction of anesthesia, different recovery periods. How long was that supposed to last? How many years does it take to do 9 surgeries on a 2-year-old's eye?

He was going to develop glaucoma. He was going to have cataract. He was going to have all those secondary downstream issues. He had to be on an antibiotic wash, obviously during the surgery, then an antibiotic after an antibiotic drop, and then he had to be on a steroid drop to try to prevent the glaucoma, to try to also soften the scarring because he had a vertical scar running down the front of his eye in addition to the laceration, the L. So what happened was the talon or beak or whatever, it punctured and then ripped. So it was shaped like an L back. That's what got stitched up. Also happened to be right where his pupil is. And so then what ended up happening is it was this— it was basically this year of that we'd get bad news and we'd get worse news and we'd get worse news. And we all— we thought we were going in to get his ear stitched up. So then we found lacerations. It was on the top of his head as well. Here he had lacerations on his face. You could see where the rooster grabbed onto his body. He had talon marks all in his body. And something I always love to point out about this story is that Hollis is an amazing kiddo. And right when he walked in, they they try to push on their standard of care. So they're like, we need to give him nasal Xanax, we need to calm him down. And Hollis was silent. He was nursing, he wasn't even crying. And I was like, you were still nursing at 2 years? Yeah, Hollis still nurses and he's 4.

Oh my gosh, wow.

So I, I said, clearly he is fine, and if his belligerence impedes your productivity, then we can talk about the nasal Xanax, but he seems to me to be doing just fine right now. And then they kind of backed off. And so they ended up never using their nasal Xanax, never using any of the happy gas, anything they wanted to use on him, because I talked to Hollis. Hey Hollis, this is what's happening. Hey Hollis, they're gonna have to put this loud noise on your arm. He went under. That was the worst 3 hours probably of my life. Like when they take him back and you just can't go back. I put— I pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed. And then I'm like, how far can I push? Can I actually not go back there? And they're like, this is like actually where we draw the line. Like, and I'm like, okay. So I just stared at the little glass thing for 3 hours, and when the surgeon came out, he was like, so it's worse than we thought, and I have 5 pieces of bad news for you, and no good, and this, this, this, this, this. These are all the things that could happen. The worst thing that could happen is that he could get an infection that would travel to the brain. He is blind. He is gonna have a cataract. He has a lateral scar. All these things. He's gonna develop amblyopia. He's gonna develop a strabismus, like all of these things. So then we started follow-up appointments and all of that, and this is around the time that you sent us the patches. We ended up— I think it was 3 weeks later— we had to be transferred to Portland because it was worse than they even thought when they told us it was worse than they thought. And we were transferred to Portland for a prosthetic eye appointment for Hollis.

So, and that would be OHSU, right?

That was OHSU.

So if you're getting sent to OHSU from Western Idaho, you know it's really bad. Why didn't they send you to Seattle?

Uh, top pediatric ophthalmologist in OHSU.

You know, when you're being referred to the next state over for pediatric ophthalmology, things are bad.

Yeah, to the— and then to the top in the world. They're the top in the world. Because we were like, are you kidding? We don't want to go to Portland. We'll go to somewhere else. We'll fly to Europe. We'll fly to— but this is the best in the world. So there we were, like, praise God, we got in our van, we drove over. And yeah, that was— my husband's mom came with us. And yeah, that was, that was a rough time. So I was, I was pregnant at this time, as you mentioned. We're in Portland, he's getting another ultrasound on his eye, and this kiddo, we just have pictures and he's just Letting them do what they need to, and he's just sad. And so they ultrasound the eye and he's been on the patches at this point, I think for 2 weeks.

And tell us the story behind how you got the patches.

Yeah. So you found out, I don't know, social media, I texted you. I can't remember.

So I had just gotten into LifeWave 3 or 4 months earlier. I was just starting to really get great testimonials back and contact more people about it. I thought this might be up your alley. I'm still very wary of overselling it because network marketing has such a negative reputation. So whenever someone tells me, because what I would typically do is I would say, hey, how are you? What's going on? Et cetera, et cetera. Find out what's going on in their life. And you told me that your kiddo had this problem with his eye and I was horrified and I shipped you the patches without really explaining to you that there was an income option because I didn't want to make it about that, knowing what you were going through as a parent. And being at the time incapable of imagining how horrible that would be.

Yeah.

So I figured if it made sense, you would jump in later and I would deal with that then. Plus I'm, I'm always busy. So I actually often don't close the loop. Not that I'm recommending this, but you know, I have so much going on that I often don't close the loop with people because there's just not enough hours in the day. So I shipped you the patches and then I think I sent you a few follow-up texts to make sure you used them, but I really didn't know what to expect because this was my first time recommending them to a kiddo. And I also didn't reply to you. I'm sure. I'm sure you had. Yeah. And I totally understand why we have had in the last 6 months, my wife and I, we have so many text messages. Oh, we didn't respond to that. Oh, we didn't respond to that. We've just had too much going on with our own boy. So we know all about that now.

Yeah. So you sent them and I remember it was X39, X49, several months worth. I think we didn't use them at first. And then I just remember opening them and I saw on it, it said phototherapy or something like that. And I'm like, oh, I know what phototherapy is. There's nothing that these can do to hurt my kid. So the only thing that they can do is help him. We slapped one on him. And so then we are in Portland, and at this point Hollis literally has hundreds of thousands of people around the world praying for him. Like, his story kind of went viral. Um, I'll meet people here in Hawaii that they're— I'll start talking about the rooster and they're like, wait, did your little boy get attacked by a rooster? My friend whose friend is in this ministry, whatever, sent out this prayer thing. It went out like globally, people all around the world praying for Hollis. And the day before we actually went to Portland We went to church and, you know, some friends laid hands on him and prayed and just like in full belief that his eye was healed. And, you know, of course that's what we want to believe too. And we're like, all right. And then we go to the co-op after church to like get lunch. And Hollis— I just have the chills right now as I talk about this because Hollis gets down and he starts running around Pilgrim screaming, Jesus healed my eye! Jesus healed my eye! And we're like, oh my God, that's so cute, you know. And he knew. We get transferred to Portland, they're doing the ultrasound, and, you know, Sometimes doctors are hard to read, so they're just doing it and, and I'm just there like a basket case. And I leave because at this point I'm so sick from what has happened and I'm pregnant that I, I can't be in the room anymore. I'm like too PTSD. I get out. So me and Hollis leave the room and Tommy and his mom stay in cuz I'm like, I can't take any more bad news. So we go out and I'm at the front desk making his appointment. 5:45 check-in for the prosthetic. I come to this bu— building, you know, I'm asking all the questions and When I look on it now, I'm like, oh my God, I was making an appointment for my 2-year-old to get a prosthetic eye. And so then we're outside playing with the little cars they have, you know, because it's a pediatric clinic. And my husband and his mom walk out and I'm like, have the appointment made. And Tommy like grabs the paper out of my hand. I can't fully remember. And like rips it up. And I'm like, we need, we need that. Like, I'm not going to remember this. My brain is so fried right now. We need that. And he's like, the surgeons and the specialist said they have no idea like what God we're praying to and what we've been doing.

Were those their exact words?

Yeah, whatever they said, whatever you've been praying to, it's working because we're not— we don't have an appointment for your son tomorrow. His eye is healing. He said as we're looking at it under the microscope or whatever they're looking, they can actively see the blood draining from his eye. They said this blood would take 6 months to drain from his eye, and it was 3 weeks that it was all gone. And that was— that's why they were on the steroid, because the glaucoma, all that blood was going to create pressure, and it was just like a liquid highway. His blood was just leaving the eye like so rapidly and efficiently. The body was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. The scar was softening, and they sent us home without getting a prosthetic eye for our little boy. And at this point, I still— I forgot, I like have the patches on them, but I don't know what they're doing. I, I don't know. I literally have no idea. I'm like, is this just like taking magnesium? Is this like a mineral? It's just gonna help. And then it wasn't until like literally a year later after this happened and I start learning about the stem cells, I start learning about the peptide, I start learning about everything, that I'm like, this patch was a crucial player in his healing of his eye. So we put him in vision therapy. He's— has vision. He has poor vision because what has happened is the scar tissue at this point, after the dilation drops were done, tightens up and is pulled out to the side because the scar tissue pulled his pupil out. So he can see if he like turns because his pupil's over here and there's little light coming into the photon So that can mess with circadian rhythm. You know, we know all the impacts of that. We know that everything is basically moved back, whether it's millimeters or whatever, but all of that matters. The eye was designed perfectly and his now had been impaired. So we're reaching out to quantum biologists and quantum ophthalmologists and anything I can think of to possibly do this. We're doing holistic vision therapy in addition to having his eye monitored by the emergency surgeon, in addition to working, you know, everything. If you know me, you can imagine. We're patching him, we're doing castor oil, we're doing hydrogen, we're doing red light, we're doing all the things that we can. We We come back home, Hollis's eye is still stabilizing very rapidly. Every time we go in, the surgeon's just, oh, I can't believe this. Like, he's calling in all— anytime we went to the appointment, it was slightly annoying because he was like this anomaly. And every doctor, every person from college that's shadowing, they're all in the room looking at Hollis.

And Hollis, what a burden for you guys to bear.

It was crazy to see, like, wow, this happened. Okay, so then fast forward, basically his eye— I'm doing everything I can to remove tissue naturally, okay? Because that's the problem, is the scar tissue is holding this pupil there. I'm trying proteolytic enzymes, systemic enzymes, castor oil, I mean everything. And this is a thick scar. If you were to see it, it's a thick jagged scar from a rooster talon, okay? This isn't like a little scar from an incision. And so I finally get on the call with some quantum ophthalmologists, eye doctors, biologists, all sorts of different people, and they say Yeah, like I know surgeons are, are surgery happy, but I think that is what has to be done. Like I think the scar tissue has to be surgically removed. If he was older, if he was like 30, um, and you had 10 years to work on the scar tissue, yeah, probably go away. But he's 3 at this point and his development's really essential at this point with that input into his eye. So we go to Portland again. We have to go there like 3 more times during this time frame. Um, he has a follow-up surgery to remove the scar tissue and doesn't work, for lack of a better term, maybe moves the pupil less than a millimeter and the surgeon nicks his lens.

Re-cataracts.

So Hollis, right now at the time of this podcast, he has a cataract again and he's blind in his eye.

Because the surgeon nicked the lens?

Because the surgeon nicked the lens. So what was not communicated to us, and I don't know, maybe intentionally, maybe not, we didn't realize how high risk of a surgery this was. It's the eye. Come on, like it's super small. We know that from the get-go. If you could imagine 16 stitches in the eye, you're like, how small are those stitches? Like in a little boy's eye. So basically what we'll find out after is like they're standing on the top of this mountain peak and that's like the area he has to work on in Hollis's eye. And he tried his best and he wasn't able to do much without causing more collateral damage. And, um, so within 6 days of the surgery, his eye cataract— I saw it, like I saw the cataract form.

Did they tell you any statistics about the success rate of the surgery?

It's too rare of a surgery. Those are all the questions we asked. How many successes? How many of these do you do a year? Whereas like a normal, cataract surgery, hundreds of thousands, but a, this close to the retina, this, this, this very specific, I do less than one of these a year kind of thing.

And as over a 20 or 30 year surgical career, plus your mentors, plus your colleagues, you can put together a dataset.

Yeah.

And one of the things that bothers me about the way mainstream medicine, and I'm not going to, I'm not meaning to throw stones because I work in integrative medicine where we don't have a lot of data either, partly because we have very small sample sizes. But I still try to generate the data and, you know, it's consenting people, like informed consent as a process is really tough because when you don't have a lot of data, it's just really hard to know what to tell families and they really have to go and operate on trust. But it's, that just makes it doubly tragic when somebody makes a recommendation to you and then you get a bad outcome.

Yeah.

Particularly when there's an element of operator error in the bad outcome. It's very hard and very, I mean, that's what malpractice really comes down to is people tend to sue doctors over bad outcomes when they didn't feel fully consented and they didn't really understand the implications of what they were doing.

Yeah, yeah. And he— so we were very like, what is the percentage? What is this? What is the odds? What is— and he was very reluctant. I don't do enough of these. Basically, he was a very good doctor, calm, and the way he communicated, but he wouldn't give us a clear answer. And so it was left down to like all this research I had done prior, all the other people I'd spoken to prior. Basically like, this is the only hope of his eye getting into the center. That's what it came down to, is if you don't do it, you're going to be bummed that you didn't do it in case it would have worked. But like, we have to get that pupil to the center of his eye. Now his pupil is more in the center of his eye, but he's blind, so what's the point of that? We don't take these diagnoses as set in stone. He had a cataract when the rooster attacked him and it cleared up, so I'm like, why can't his body do that again? And so that's what we've been working on, and it is— the cataract is going away. It is going away. We put carnesine around his eye every single day or every single night, depending on—

for those not hip with the lingo, the carnosine, she means the carnosine patches from LifeWave. And there will be a buy link, by the way, if you want to enroll with Ashley. She's on our team. You get access to me as a mentor and you get access to all of our team resources. We would love to have you join under Ashley, so we'll include her buy links in the episode.

Yeah. So he wears an X39 every day for 8 hours because he's a kiddo, and then he wears a carnosine every day as well for 8 hours, or we'll put it on him overnight. And we do hydrogen in the goggles per recommendation of Carrie Bennett. After I'd done a bunch of research, she helped connect me with someone in San Diego. We drove like 2 hours to go and get this 30-minute hydrogen treatment, and we actually just got the machine. It's on the way here. So that will be hydrogen. We'll also do eye rinses with the hydrogen water and then, um, drinking hydrogen water as well as we moved— a big part of moving to Hawaii is so we could have that charge of the sun and the sea and all of that to support his body, and the way we eat and live is very holistic and supportive. So I don't really think there's anything that he's missing out on right now to get that eye supported, and the, the cataract is truly going away. And he says all the time, I'll be able to see again, Mom, it's just taking some time. He's in full belief that this cataract is healing as well.

It's amazing how that belief piece comes up over and over again in these podcasts. I did not anticipate it or expect it, and I think the hardest thing is to believe what you're told is unbelievable.

Yeah, because it almost makes adults feel— for kids, they have that, that, that's like the childlike faith. They don't feel silly for saying my eye is going to heal, right? Adults, we have this, I read about this and I know about this and this is a diagnosis and the doctor must be right. And so you have to set all that aside and ask yourself, do you have that childlike faith too? Because when you do, like, a lot of crazy things happen. And so Hollis believed his eye healed before he went to Portland, and his eye healed. And there was like 0% chance in medical world that that was going to happen. And then now he will lay down at night and I just tell him, I said, your eye's healing and you're going to be able to see again soon out of it and whatever. He goes, I know, I know, I don't know why you keep telling me that, I know. Hollis, he's very forward. So anyways, that's where his eye stands right now. He's blind in his injured eye. We are continuing to work on it and his pupil is shaped like crazy wacky. He's, he's fine. He's a 4-year-old. He has a lot of fun. If we made these like patch glasses for him, 'cause when we first, when he first had the attack, you know, they wanted us to like blind patch on like black and I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. But we'll do, so there's still light input. We created this like kind of blurry film on a pair of sunglasses. We popped the lenses out and then made a blurry film like on a clear lens. And so he put those on here actually in Hawaii the other day and he's blind. He's blind in this eye, so he's literally just like walking around like he can see the light but he can't see anything. Um, it's also very hard to get a 4-year-old to describe what exactly they're seeing. And so yeah, back now to 2023, a month after the rooster incident, I'm now probably like, I don't know, 10 weeks pregnant or 12 weeks pregnant, I can't remember. And we buy our house in Coeur d'Alene that we were so looking forward to, and a couple days after moving in I start having symptoms. And other than that, we're pretty good until winter. And then when winter comes in and you're in the house a lot more, uh, we're not pretty good anymore. Hollis starts getting a wide variety of symptoms that he's never had in his life. My husband almost dies from a rare necrotizing mouth infection. And I actually was looking through our texts— that's what I was doing a minute ago— to see if I could find like when we were texting about LifeWave. But instead, the first text I saw was, hey Leland, I think Tommy's dying, basically. Like, what do you think? So the bacteria— okay, so Tommy almost dies from this rare necrotizing mouth infection. It was on my birthday, Hollis's birthday, and it was 10 days before Wilder was due to be born. He's just like on the ground. I think he's going septic. We have like a person in the house with IV. It's horrible. And lo and behold, Wilder then is born in the house and he's born sick. And I'm like, babies aren't born sick, okay? Babies aren't born sick. And so I immediately like a couple of days after Wilder's born, I'm like, run this test, run this test. And our house comes back with biohazardous levels of toxic black mold.

Which test did you run?

So the dust test is like an at-home test that I would recommend people do before they, like, pay thousands and thousands.

Did you have a company you ran it through that you recommend?

Yeah, it's called The Dust Test.

Okay.

Who—

who runs that?

Michael Rubino. And it was basically created out of I might have this slightly wrong, but I believe it's the sons of the main guys behind the ERMI. They took all the ERMI data and have now changed it to be more modern, and that's the Dust Test. So you're basically swabbing different parts of your home with dust, sending it in, and then it comes back with mycotoxin. So it's not a mold test, it's a mycotoxin test, which mycotoxins are essentially the byproduct of— or as Evan Brand says, the the mold farts of the mold. So you know that there's likely active mold in the house. That might not always be the case. It could be old dust, whatever. But we ran that and our home came back basically the worst it could be out of like the statistical data. And, um, so then after that we brought in like an environmental inspection agency and we did that and then it was like way worse. So to give an example, one of the levels in our home is supposed to be less than 1,000 and ours was 63 million. This was a bacteria. This is the— this is what we're now assuming caused Tommy's necrotizing mouth infection that was eating his gums away. It was horrible.

Terrible. Has he made a full recovery?

Yeah, recovery.

Amazing. We'll have an episode with him, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, now we're—

how long did it take you to figure out that it was mold?

Well, we bought that— before we bought the house, we had it inspected for mold, and they found a little, a little bit of black mold in the attic, so We had it remediated, um, or so we thought. And that's a whole different story. Long story short, the company was fraudulent, negligent, did not remediate it at all. So when you have an issue like -20 degrees in the winter and 80 degrees inside of the home because of a fireplace going, you have 100— what is that, 120-degree difference? Um, with no ventilation, so that's a problem. So our attic was this mold breeding ground, which then made bacterial issues. So common things that people can like look at if they're kind of like, oh my God, maybe there's mold in my house— this isn't mold, but this is bacteria— is like the pink around a toilet. People say that's normal. That's not normal, that's bacteria. How fast— so one of my main indicators, my sourdough starter molded every single time I would try to use it. Yeah. And I'm like, that seems super weird. And so I had these, you know, I had especially moms men too, but I have a very strong intuition, and I knew from the moment we bought the house that it wasn't— I don't know if they did it good. I don't know if they did a good job. It just didn't feel right.

How long did it take you to figure it out? Yeah, from the time you moved in until the time you found the mold?

Uh, 6, 6 and a half months.

So the question I always ask patients to speed this up is, is anyone else in your family sick? And the second question is, do you feel better when you go on vacation?

Yep.

And the third question is, do your symptoms coincide with a change in domicile or office?

Or—

this hasn't happened yet, but vehicle. I have seen labs deranged because of a vehicle emissions leak in the transmission. But anyway, and usually if there's any suspicion there, we will immediately say have your house inspected. We do recommend some kind of dust testing. So like, just so for people to really understand this, is you just take a Sometimes it looks like a Swiffer pad or it's a mitt or it's something.

Glasses wipe.

And you just scoop up some dust and then you send that off to be analyzed. We actually had a patient just this week who had horrific nausea and vomiting on our vitamin C protocol, which is unheard of. And her levels on her mold testing were extremely elevated in the apartment, which sounded like a disaster to begin with. And so, yeah, we see it all the time. We see it all the time that people get sick. From mold. And people, especially in the conventional world, don't know anything about it. And you, as a result of this— because I think you felt you were a pretty savvy health and wellness consumer by this time, but you went on such a journey with mold that you actually put together a whole course, which we'll include a link to below if you want to learn all about mold. Encourage you to take that. So tell everyone about your course, your mold course, and how all this shook out. Because you guys have, as I think I've mentioned, made a complete recovery from this, thanks in part to LifeWave, nutrition, all the things you knew, but most of all getting rid of the mold, which is critical if it's part of your problem.

Yeah, so basically trusting the body, you know, knowing this isn't like, oh, I'm in the north, people get sick in the winter. This was way worse than that, like Hollis's lymph nodes turning into literal rocks. Like, I'm like, was this ice burn? Was a zipper like on his— you know, Tommy has the necrotizing mouth thing. I have frequent recurrent sinusitis every 2 weeks. I can't eat until 2:00 PM every day, and I'm pregnant and nursing a 3-year-old child. So I'm dwindling into like nothing. The aversions— but this is, this is like the sick part— is all of it was being chalked up to stress. My little boy had just been attacked by a rooster, so this must be the stress, this must be the stress, you know.

It's a common— it's a theme in the integrative world that stress gets scapegoated. And I always tell patients it's very easy to scapegoat things. It's the mold, it's the Lyme, it's the stress, it's the But then what I find happening, and this is particularly, you know, like the patients who go to the Lyme doctor, they miss the mold. The patients who go to the mold doctor, they miss the whatever else it is. And that's why I heard a podcast recently where these two people were talking about you need a specialist for everything. I said, no, you need a generalist often because we will catch the things and then we will refer out appropriately.

Yeah.

So if I actually need a thyroid specialist to see you, I will refer. Yeah. And most of the time you don't need that. And if you need a surgeon, I will refer. And if you need an exam like an ultrasound, an MRI— I ordered an MRI on a patient with new headaches the other day, came back normal. He doesn't need to see a headache specialist yet. He does not need to see a neurologist yet. He does not need to see a neurosurgeon yet. And yeah, so, and we just see people miss things all the time, which is why it's great you created this course.

Yeah. And so then, because I'm an extremist, as we talked about, people like, oh, you're just an extremist. It's okay to feel sick in the winter. There's no vitamin D. I'm like, I literally do this for work. I get it. But I was just like, this must be the stress. But then in the back of my mind, there was just this, like, the sourdough's molding, the faucet. Like, there was just a few things. And then Wilder's born and he's puffy. Like, we'd have to take him into our shower to stimulate or simulate a steam room 5 times a night so he could breathe.

That is so abnormal.

Yeah. So I'm like, this isn't just winter or north. Like, he's a baby. And so I finally am like, run the test, Tommy. Crawl up in the attic. And Tommy crawls down and he's he's like, so it's a horror show. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, this is fine. I'm just like, had a baby a week ago. And so the big thing with our mold story is that there is hope to heal if you're willing to put in the work, which means that you will likely get uncomfortable. I evacuated my house 4 weeks postpartum with a brand new newborn baby, a 3-year-old, and almost like my husband almost died, and we had nowhere to go. We had our van, so we Praise God we had our van. It was parked in our driveway. We ran a space heater out to our van so we could stay warm. It was cold, so the van, you know, was able to keep warm until we were able to find a rental. And I didn't know the severity of the mold. I thought we were gonna evacuate for a week, have to remediate it, and move back in. We left our house on March 7th, and I never moved back into my house again, ever. And I got to own my dream home in Coeur d'Alene for less than 7 months. And the symptoms went away when we left. We went on like 2 trips during the house, so there was too many things that lined up. So when there's too many things that are lining up, you can't ignore it just because you know the repercussions or what are of what are going to come when you find out there's mold. Because let me tell you, our mold thing was a nightmare. We went almost $100,000 into debt, but I'd rather go into $100,000 into debt than to stay sick in a home and pretend that I can do things to make it better.

Absolutely. It's so funny you say that. I have a colleague, I was sitting with him a couple months ago and he's on the phone with this lady who's spending something like $1,000 an hour to talk to him because he's really, really good. And he's like, Leland Stillman, every 6 months this woman books time with me for an hour for me to tell her that she has to abandon her moldy home in a really nice neighborhood. And every 6 months I tell her that no amount of supplements, stem cells, ozone, sauna therapy, nutritional supplements, IVs is going to make her mold toxicity better, but she keeps throwing money away. It's almost like, do you say no more, no more treatments for you? Yeah, like, please find another doctor, you know. But it's really important for patients to get this. We see this a lot, and it's part of why we screen our patients very carefully, because if you are not going to put in the work and do the things that matter, we just would rather you go somewhere else. Absolutely. You know, or at least just because we don't want to be giving people false hope. And man, people just stay sick in moldy places.

You want to see results too, just as much as they want results. And so I remember finally getting the point because my sweet husband, he was naive about it. We'll just switch rooms because we knew the attic above our room was really bad. I'm like, Tommy, this is like a vapor, like trying to explain, like, it's not enough. And so I literally, I'm like, honey, I love you more than life. Me and your boys are leaving this house tonight, and you're welcome to stay here if you want. I knew, I knew he would come. I knew he would come with, but like, he needed that extreme, like, Ashley's not messing around. Well, where will we go? I will pitch a tent in my backyard. We have a host of sheepskin rugs and wool in this house, and we'll be just fine. I'm Alaska Native, okay? And he got the point. I'm like, I would rather go and live in a tent in the middle of the woods and not be sick and poisoning my kids and you for another single day. So we moved out. That started our March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, 10-month post-mold journey where we moved probably more than 13 times because at this point we had a $4,000 mortgage on our house in Coeur d'Alene because we got in when the rates were high and whatever. Oh, $4,000 mortgage on our home. We are $100,000 in debt. So like having to pay that off and then with all of what happened with Hollis, um, his one surgery was $31,000 and then that kept compiling. And then we were obviously not working as much because I was like very sick and unhealthy.

We could probably do a whole nother podcast episode on just how to not go broke cuz you've been through it already.

Yeah, we should.

Should we?

So yeah, we should, we seriously should because I get asked this all the time, like, okay. This is what the podcast will be. How Ashley went from $60,000 in debt on January 1st to moving to Hawaii on blah blah blah with like now abundance because it was a huge mind thing and it was a lot of that. But anyways, left the home. Gracious friends let us live with them. We moved a bunch of times. Instagram followers had Airbnbs they let us stay in and all sorts of different things. And the house ended up getting remediated because a lot of people just sell the house as is. I'm like, I cannot consciously sell this as is even if I disclose it. Because I know that someone is not going to care enough and is going to move in it and is going to get sick. So I don't care how much it costs, I have to remediate this. I don't care how much it costs. We remediated it, came back with flying colors. So I'm like, this is probably the healthiest home in all of Coeur d'Alene because we brought in the best of the best to do it and worked with all sorts of different people. And then we're able to— on the report, I just right away disclose this house was filled with mold, we had it inspected, here's all the documentation, and lovely family bought it and they have their kids there and they get to enjoy my beautiful garden and all the things. But at this point now we're just kind of basically floating around trying to figure out how to heal, what to do. And I think a really big point that I'm not going to spend too much time on is that I think that I kept us sicker for longer than we should have been sick because of my mental state of sick. I was in this mental state of depravity, scarcity, fear, PTSD. From what had happened to Hollis, then the mold. It was just like a 2-year nightmare. And so I remember one day, actually, I was— the boys were all asleep. Wilder's born at this point, obviously. And I felt— I was like walking through our living room and I felt this like demonic spirit, truly. Like, and I saw it, kind of, not like with my physical, but— and I was just like, wow, I have allowed like this spirit of suppression in my home, in my body, on our health, on our finances. And I remember, like, again, chilled. Tommy was sleeping. I like wanted to like run in the room and like get under the blankets with Tommy because it was scary. I felt like a little kid. And instead I like stood there and like about tearing up saying this, and I just was like, you are not welcome here anymore. You can't— this, this evil, this demonic spirit, this suppression, this illness is not welcome in my family anymore. For our finances, for our health, for our spiritual— like, me and Tommy became, you know, still the best parents we could be, but we had much shorter tempers and we didn't know how to respond because we were so depleted, minerally, nutritionally, um, emotionally. At this point, you know, we're wearing the patches and I'm very like nervous system dysregulated at this point. I just can't control my emotions. 10 days after consistently patching, realizing I achieved total nervous system balance. And this was from— if I'd hear like a bang, I would be shaking on the ground because I was so imbalanced in the nervous system. And we were able to— less than— it was 10 months. So 10 months from a horrible, horrible mycotoxin test, which is the test that you take to know— and OATS— less than 10 months, Hollis has just came back free. He has no mycotoxins in his body at all. That's like unheard of for how bad ours was. Tommy had 3 different— he He either had 3 or 2 different ones extremely elevated. He only has 1 in a very small amount, and I had 3 different ones, and I only have 1 in a very small amount as well. So less than 10 months, um, we were wearing— we didn't add the glutathione until later. I actually added it in right away, and that was— don't do that. X39 is going to raise your glutathione levels 30%. Glutathione patch is going to raise them 300-400%. So if you're someone who is ill and you're like, I need glutathione, I don't recommend you start with the glutathione patch. I recommend you start with the X39. That's going to raise levels 30% instead of that 300-400, which is going to potentially cause you to herx. That's what happened to us. We put it on and I had like a herx response to the patch. And remembering too that this isn't glutathione going into your body. This is being upregulated within your body. This isn't sublingual, topical, anything like that. And so X39, X49 is what we started with, and then Hollis is obviously doing the carnosine for his eye. Wilder has on the X39 just for less time because he's a baby. And then about 2 months in, we added glutathione. And then like I said, 10 months down the mold journey road, we— our test all came back with flying colors, showing that the support, the antioxidants, the binders, the patches, all of that are huge key players, and the patches really being the key player, because I cannot stress enough like how much of an extremist I am for my health. So when we were on this mold protocol, there's not much more that I changed nutritionally, supplementally, antioxidants. We eat really well, live really well to begin with. The patches changed our lives. Like, they literally changed our lives. They helped us to detox from this horrible bacteria, mold, parasites— like horrible parasitic infestation from the mold and bacteria. For anyone who is mold sick, I highly would recommend— oh, and Aeon. I'm sorry, I didn't include Aeon. We had Aeon in here for—

that was what reset your nervous system, correct?

The Aeon? Yes, Aeon is the patch that reset my nervous system 10 days in. So Aeon is a really great place to start if you're someone with a lot of inflammation, you're really sick from heavy metal poisoning or mold toxicity. And then normally what I'll have my clients do, so we'll do Aeon for those really sick people for 1 month, and then at month 2 we add in the X39 paired with the Aeon. And then if they really want to, maybe month 3 or 4, if they're ready, we'll add in glutathione. It's just an excellent tool. It's an excellent supporter, and our family is absolutely delighted to have found these from you, to have incorporated them into our lifestyle, and now to be partners with them. Because I mean, they just— they changed our life. We— I, I truly don't believe, and I actually know this, I've worked with clients for several years on detoxing from mold and stuff And I've never seen a result this fast, ever. Same with my specific mold nutritionist we hired. She's like, what the heck do you mean? That was really bad. Your guys' levels were really bad and they're gone now and we're healthy now. And it's less— this was in March of last year. It's now June of this year and we're, we're cruising.

And if you see somebody like Neil Nathan, he'll tell you, who's like the mold expert, he'll tell you that it'll take 2 years to clear blood levels. So for you to do it in 10 months is less than—

and that's just when we took the test. I mean, who knows how fast it actually happened, right?

So Ashley, thank you again for joining me. Everyone who's tuning in, thank you so much for listening. We look forward to chatting with you again in the next episode.