On The Health Front

Another month has quickly flown by.  There is just over 2 weeks before we leave for Edmonton, lots has happened in the past weeks, but there is still lots more to be done. 

After we moved back home we seen a quick decline in Matthew’s health again and so we made the decision to move him out of the house.  We brought in new bedrooms:

  

We are borrowing my parents 5^th wheel camper for the kids to sleep in.  Rob and I continue to sleep in the house –windows open, air filter nearby.  With the warmer weather the windows in the house could remain open most of the time and the kids could spend more time outdoors.  With the windows open they are in the house after school until bedtime, if windows are closed we really encourage them to be outside – especially Matthew who seems the most quickly affected.

In the past month we have seen improvement in all three kids.  The most obvious is Matthew.  He will quickly deteriorate in enclosed environments, but does well outdoors.  Unfortunately this does not mean he is better.  His “Rate Your Pain Scale” will go down to a 3 at times, but also goes up to 7-7.5 still.  Previously he was always around 6-8.5, so this is good, but we are not getting him to a point where he is free from dizziness and headaches.  Hopefully this will come when he has no more exposure to the house, but we do see that school can be taxing on him as well.  He wakes up doing fairly well, makes it through school, but often comes home not feeling so great anymore. He seems to do better on weekends.  We are hoping this is just because he’s not completely clear from mold and not that he is going to continue to have trouble with most indoor environments.  Time will tell. 

The girls have had some slight improvements.  Marietta is able to handle a bit more.  She’s seen a shift in how she reacts to things.  Previously she had to use great caution in what she would do as one activity could wipe her out for days, but now she’s finding this is no longer happening, or at least not as bad.  This allows her to make decisions based on how she’s feeling at the moment.   This means she can participate in more things, but that she doesn’t make a decision until just before an event on whether she can attend or not.   She continues to have ups and downs, but they are less related to when she overdid it.  The best news is that she has been able to attend part of the afternoon church service for the past four weeks.  She still cannot handle the noise from the singing and all the people can be overstimulating, but she is able to sneak in quietly for the sermon part and then leaves as soon as the minster says “Amen”. 

Rebecca is still always tired and needs tons of sleep, but has also seen some slight improvements, we especially love that she is always singing to herself now as she goes about her day ... those small things that make you realize she's feeling a bit better.  She has been struggling more with migrating pains lately that pain medicine doesn’t seem to help.  For a period of time it was her neck and back, this has settled a bit and now she’s dealing more with her foot and her hip.  Some pains last a day or so, others stick around for a bit longer.  But she’s tough and continues to make it to school each day. 

Whether the girls improvements are related to the reduced exposure to mold is hard to say.  In general many people feel better when the sun shines more, the weather warms up and they can spend more time outdoors.  We do find it coincidental that Marietta made improvements in her health last summer and is now again making progress once it’s warmer out. 

With regards to the urine tests we had done.  The results shows that we are all excreted the toxin Ochratoxin, which is produced by the mold Aspergillus Orchraceaus, which is the mold that was the highest in our home.  Matthew’s results came back very high for this one and he also came back with very high results for the toxin Verrucarin A which is produced by Stachybotrys (Black Toxic Mold) which is also high in our home.    There is much dispute about how to read this test, which is why we struggled on whether to spend the money on it.  Is a high result a bad thing? Or does it mean that your body is doing a good job of excreting the toxins?  If a low result a good thing?  Or does it mean that your body doesn’t know how to excrete the toxins and they are building up in your system?  Our reading tells us that doing this test on it’s own might not be the best indication, but together with the ERMI test which indicates the environment we’re living in it can help us to understand what our body is doing with the toxins it is being exposed to.    Matthew’s levels were far beyond the normal/acceptable level and he is the one most obviously effected by the mold that we can tell … so there does seem to be some correlation in what the test is telling us since it tells us he’s excreting excessive amounts of the exact molds that are the problem in our home.

The urine test also helps us to know detox methods as each toxin responds different to different detox methods.  We have not worked on any of these yet as we’ve just been so overwhelmed with everything else I haven’t had time to wrap my brain around it.  Everyone knows that once we leave here and get settled in Edmonton there will be some changes to our diet, which is one of the first detox methods.  For now we’re just focusing on trying to empty all the food in the house so that we have less to pack up or get rid of later … I started with three freezers and now we’re down to two, which really could be decreased to one if I just found the time to combine the two.

I recently talked to the clinic in Edmonton again and they advised that they have made some changes to the program.  We can still opt to follow the old program, but this would mean doing HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy) at a different location and then all the other treatment at the clinic.  They feel that the studies and information coming from China verifies that the new set up is better.  This leaves us with more to think about.  Since we never follow the norm I’m scared to be one of the first ones on their new program as they won’t know enough about the program to know if it’s just us or the change in protocol. 

The biggest change is that they are now doing HBOT twice a day instead of once.  One hour first thing in the morning and then one hour at the end of the day.  The effects of HBOT lasts for about 3-4 hours in your body, so this way your body is getting more long term effects in a day.  Because they are doing the therapy more frequently in a day that will mean that they can possibly shorten the program and you could be done in four weeks. This means that they spend the first week doing all the testing and such, and the next three weeks doing the detox program.  Previously you did the testing and at the beginning and just did HBOT for 2-3 weeks before you started the detox program.  At the end of the four week period they will reevaluate to see whether longer treatment is needed.  They told us to still count on 8 weeks of treatment, but we could possibly be done in 4 weeks.  This means that these four weeks will be intense weeks, there won’t be any time to slowly settle in as we had original expected with old protocol that was a bit less intense for the first 3 weeks.

The preference day for starting on this program is Monday.  We had original planned to start treatment the last Wednesday of June, but have now bumped our starting date to July 2.   We still have not set a date in stone on when we are leaving,  most likely it is June 15^th that we are leaving.   This will give us a two week period to breath air outside of Ontario and see how we do.  Is this long enough?  We’re not sure, I guess we’ll figure that out as we go. 

As far as Lodging goes we will be following up with the Ronald MacDonald to let them know our changed arrival date and see if they can give any indication of our chance of a room … but most likely we won’t know when we leave here where we are going to be staying.  There is a family in Edmonton that is going on holidays for a couple weeks around the time that we are arriving in Edmonton that has offered their home for us to stay in while they are gone.  This will give us a bit of time to figure out the rest of our game plan.

I think that sums up the health front of things for the time being