The 7-Year Journey to Save Our Daughter (That Ended Up Saving Us All)- The Hidden Mold

We haven’t told many people this story. For a long time, it just felt too raw. Too personal. Too painful. But after seven long, life-altering years—we’re finally ready—because maybe what we went through can help someone else. For years, we felt like we were drowning in a storm, a rising flood that no one else could see. Now that we’ve come out the other side, we know how important it is to speak up—for the people still in it or that don’t know it’s coming. If this story helps even one family feel seen, validated, or guided in the right direction, then our journey—while brutal—becomes something bigger than just our own.

Thankfully, we’re fighters. My Dad used to say, “It doesn’t matter the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog!”… That we’ve got. We’ve leaned on our faith and on an incredible support system that lifted us through the darkest season of our lives—when it felt like our entire world was crumbling.

It all started in late August 2016. We brought our sweet baby daughter home from the hospital. She was perfect—every dad’s dream in a seven-pound bundle.

But within just a few weeks, something changed.

At night, we’d hear strange, gasping sounds coming from her bassinet. First, 30 seconds. Then, minutes. Then hours. We watched over her every night holding our own breath until she took her next.

Her little body stopped growing. She dropped from the 70th percentile to the 3rd. Her beautiful, bright eyes lost their sparkle. While other babies were crawling and exploring, she just lay there, motionless like a sloth. She cried in pain during feedings, arching her back from silent reflux that eventually scarred her throat.

Then came the milestones she missed—she stopped babbling, stopped making eye contact, stopped using her right arm, wasn’t crawling or sitting. She developed eczema, chronic ear infections, plugged tear ducts, and eventually lost the pigment in her skin and was diagnosed with vitiligo—an autoimmune disorder.

Every day brought something new. Something worse. And it wasn’t just her. The rest of our family was always sick. Always tired. We felt off. And deep down, we knew something was very, very wrong.

I was working 60–70 hours a week, doing everything I could to support the family and fund our search for answers. I spent my days fixing everyone else’s problems but had no time, energy, or resources left to solve my own. Meanwhile, Megan spent every waking hour researching, studying, reaching out to experts, and asking questions no one could answer.

The constant barrage of fear, hopelessness, worry, loneliness, inadequacy- it was relentless. And yet, when it’s your child, giving up just isn’t an option.

One day, her pediatrician asked if mold might be a factor. We laughed. Mold? In our nine-year-old home? No musty smell. No leaks. No visible signs. It had passed every inspection.

Still, we wanted to entertain every idea and figured we had nothing to lose but money. We hired a mold specialist, paid for extensive testing, and waited weeks for the results.

“Safe. Normal.” Another dead end. More money wasted. No answers. But our daughter was still getting worse.

She developed a long list of new, frightening symptoms—blood sugar dysregulation, tinnitus, hearing loss, severe allergies, joint pain, restless legs, sleep apnea, trouble concentrating, night terrors, heart palpitations, vertigo, acid reflux, brain fog, anemia, etc. She caught influenza A, and it took her down for a month. Her body had no fight in it. It felt endless.

We saw dozens of specialists. Drove hundreds, thousands of miles. Everyone agreed something was seriously wrong, but no one knew what. Just more referrals. More invasive tests. Potential diagnoses piled up – cerebral palsy, Chiari malformation, Type 1 diabetes, autism, rheumatoid arthritis, neurological and genetic disorders, and autoimmune diseases. Nothing conclusive. Ultimately every “expert” and treatment was ineffective.

Our baby screamed and cried through countless blood draws, MRI’s, CT scans, sleep studies, barium swallow studies and overnight tests.

No matter what we tried, our daughter kept getting worse. And the years kept passing.

We tried to hide our depression and exhaustion from our kids and everyone else in our life. We tucked the kids in at night and stayed up for hours, reading, researching, and chasing any lead. Nothing made sense. We fought like our lives depended on it, because they did, but we were lost and losing hope.

Something was attacking our little girl— and we weren’t going to stop until we found it.

Eventually, we found another functional doctor we really trusted, and once again, mold came up. So, this time we hired one of the most respected mold inspectors in the state and spared no expense. They used all the tools. All the tech. They cared and were thorough…

Again, they told us our home was fine, safe, completely normal.

And then everything changed.

In our relentless search for answers, we stumbled across something new: mold detection dogs. We heard they were having wild success finding mold when others couldn’t. Like bomb-sniffing dogs but trained to detect toxic mold. There were only a few in the country and they were all so far away… One handler in Florida said yes. We told him our story and begged him to drive the 1,200 miles. We didn’t know what else to try so we had nothing to lose.

The big day arrived. The handler and the dog showed up. We tried not to get our hopes up, we’d been let down too many times before. But within thirty minutes, the dog stopped by the wall next to our daughter’s bed, sat down, and pointed. The handler looked at us and said, “Tear that wall down.” Tear the wall down? That seems dramatic. But after they left, we made a small cut in the drywall. And the smell hit us like a punch in the gut. The OSB was jet black- like someone had taken a Sharpie to it. We immediately started tearing the whole wall down. Dear God.

There it was.

A massive mold colony—nearly the entire wall—black, green, white, blooming behind the vapor barrier. Right where our daughter laid her head every night. No one else had found it. Not the tools. Not the labs. Not the expensive experts. But a beautiful, smart little dog.

Once we educated ourselves, we tested the area and confirmed what we feared: spores, mycotoxins, and VOCs (basically toxic gases) had spread through our walls, our ductwork, our entire home.

We were living in poison.

What we thought was our safe place, our sanctuary against the world was destroying our bodies.

We finally had answers. And suddenly, everything clicked.

Our daughter had the worst of it, but it wasn’t just her, it was all of us. So many symptoms we had blamed on stress, lack of sleep, or unrelated diagnoses turned out to be direct results of mold exposure. The unexplained illnesses. The relentless fatigue. The brain fog. The anxiety. The digestive complaints. The autoimmune flares. The constant infections. All of it—linked back to mold exposure. Like any great mystery, once solved, hindsight brings clarity… The more we read, the more it made sense.

We moved out immediately, gutted the house and lived with friends for 6 months while we rebuilt our home and our lives. Three kids under 10, a dog, and two spent adults and they took us in. Our friends are saints!

Once we tore everything out, we discovered the truth. Our builder had cut corners. The construction was sloppy. What looked beautiful on the surface was, underneath, a disaster. And sadly, we learned that’s not uncommon.

What shocked us even more was how few people truly understood mold—not just in construction, but in healthcare and remediation, too. We encountered countless professionals who were either ill-informed or completely unaware of how dangerous mold exposure is.

We realized we had to become our own advocates, and our own experts—on mold, air quality, building science, construction, detox, and recovery. And through that process, we finally found the right professionals—the ones who actually understood what we were up against. There were shockingly few.

In the process of rebuilding our house properly and detoxing our bodies, we began the long process of rebuilding ourselves!

While we’re not fully detoxed and recovered just yet, we are working on it. But today, our daughter is growing. Laughing. Healing. Learning. We never imagined she would make it this far. Her skin pigment—the one doctors said would never return—is coming back. The brightness is back in her eyes, and her spark is back in full force. Thankfully so is ours. We didn’t realize how much we were actually affected by it until it was gone.

That kind of fight—it changes you. It redefines your values. Your priorities. Your life.

Mold took so much from us. But it also gave us clarity. It showed us what really matters.

It was this life altering experience that made me rethink my entire life and what I want to do with it. I walked away from a successful career helping run some of the biggest and best contracting companies in the state, both of whom I still have a lot of respect for… to fill a void.

To fill a void for our community and our region… and a deeper void—in myself.

What almost destroyed us ignited a passion that turned into a purpose…