BREAKING THE MOLD

Mold can be the covert culprit behind a shockingly wide range of health problems. Cate Montana looks at how it gets into the body and how we can get it out

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After performing her one-woman show on three continents, Mitzi Sinnott returned to her hundred-year-old childhood home in Kentucky exhausted and emotionally stressed. A worsening issue with knee pain eventually drove her to see an orthopedist, who gave her a steroid shot and sent her home.

But she didn’t realize her body was stressed from long-term toxic mold exposure, and the steroid shot put her immune system over the edge.

“I woke up that night and my leg felt like it was on fire, with pressure like I’d never experienced,” Mitzi says. “I couldn’t breathe, and every hour I could breathe less and less. As the days passed, I had no energy and I became acutely aware of chemical odors and the smell of mold in my mother’s home. To top it all off, I started my period and bled for 30 days. I’d never had anything like that happen before.”

She finally dragged herself to a general practitioner, who didn’t have a clue what was going on. “I got back out to the car after my appointment and told my mother, ‘I’ve gotta get out of here. I’m gonna die here.’”

Thus, Mitzi launched into a world where about 47 percent of US houses have mold issues, and 85 percent of commercial office buildings are estimated to have had water damage, mold, and other indoor air quality issues.

For a year, she lived with an uncle whose house was clean of mold. But as a performing artist who traveled to do her shows, she found that staying in hotels and going to meetings in conference rooms with no proper air filtration were problematic.