I had vision loss, debilitating brain fog, anxiety, fatigue, joint pain, and couldn’t sleep through the night. I was a practitioner, someone who works in root cause health every single day, and I could not figure out what was happening to me. I spent money on detox formulas, mitochondrial support, grounding sheets, sinus rinses, detox baths, a scalar energy pyramid, a lymphatic massager, a personal sauna, and even a vibro-acoustic sound bed. None of it touched my symptoms.
The reason nothing worked? I was living in a mold-contaminated home.
This post is about what that experience taught me, and why mold toxicity symptoms in women are something I will never overlook in a fertility workup again.
Why I Was the Only One in My House Getting Sick
One of the most disorienting parts of mold illness is that it does not affect everyone in the same environment the same way. My family members were mostly fine. I was not. That disparity is real, and it is biological.
Mold illness, also called chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), is a multi-system illness driven by biotoxins, specifically in people who cannot clear those toxins efficiently due to specific gene variants. It affects different people differently. Some of the more obvious symptoms are gut issues and skin issues. For me it was all neurological. My brain was inflamed and I felt like my head was in a fog.
Research from physician and CIRS expert Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker estimates that roughly 25% of the population carries gene variants that make them unable to mount a proper immune response to mold toxins. The biotoxins circulate, the immune system stays activated, and the whole body starts to malfunction. That was me. Not my kids. Not my partner. Me.
There is also a practical reason my exposure was more severe than everyone else in the house. I work from home. While my partner was at his NYC office and the kids were at school, I was in the house all day, every day. Full time exposure to a full time source explains a lot of the gap.
What Was Actually Happening in My Body
Mold toxins, or mycotoxins, are not passive irritants or allergens. They actively interfere with cellular function. Here is a short list of what they can do:
- Suppress the immune system
- Dysregulate the HPA axis, your stress hormone system
- Disrupt mitochondrial function
- Impair detoxification pathways
- Cross the blood-brain barrier and create neuroinflammation
- Disrupt hormonal signaling, including reproductive hormones
All of these matter for fertility, and all of them can drive the kind of hormone imbalance and egg quality issues that show up without an obvious explanation.
When the body is dealing with chronic biotoxin exposure, it prioritizes survival. Reproductive function is not a survival priority. So the body suppresses it. Progesterone drops, cortisol patterns shift, thyroid function takes a hit, and inflammation becomes the dominant physiological state. This is basic stress physiology applied to a very specific toxin load.
The Perfect Storm We Are Living In
Several converging factors are making mold illness more common and more severe right now.
Post-COVID immune dysregulation. COVID-19 left a significant portion of the population with altered immune function. When your immune system is already dysregulated, your ability to handle environmental toxin loads, including mold, is compromised. Here are some of my favorite immune system supports.
Modern building materials. Drywall, standard in US construction since the mid-20th century, is highly porous and mold-friendly. Older plaster walls were far more resistant. Combine that with airtight, energy-efficient construction that limits air exchange, and you get buildings that trap moisture with nowhere to go.
Reduced environmental resilience broadly. We are more toxic-burdened than previous generations, from pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, and EMFs. Each additional burden lowers the threshold at which mold tips someone into illness.
These are not fringe ideas. They are mechanistic realities that get clearer every year as the research catches up.
My Symptom List (And Why It Looks Like So Many Other Things)
Here is what I was experiencing before we found and remediated the mold:
- Vision changes and visual disturbances
- Persistent headaches
- Significant brain fog, the kind where you cannot hold a thought
- Non-restorative sleep (I woke up between 2 and 3am every night)
- Chronic sinus issues (these have been the slowest to fully resolve)
- Anxiety that did not match my circumstances
- Generally low mood
If you or someone you know has that combination of symptoms, especially neurological ones alongside mood changes and sleep disruption, mold should be investigated early, not as a last resort.
The frustrating thing is that every one of those symptoms can be explained away by other things. Anxiety? You are stressed. Brain fog? Poor sleep. Poor sleep? Hormones. Put them all together in a woman in her late thirties or forties and they get chalked up to perimenopause. Which is exactly where I went next.
Why I Went Down the Perimenopause Rabbit Hole
At some point I started to wonder if perimenopause was behind all of it, and looking at my symptom list, it made sense. Poor sleep, anxiety, low mood, brain fog, vision changes. That is a list that would send most women, and most practitioners, straight toward a hormone conversation.
So I went there. I tried progesterone, estrogen, adrenal support, nervous system protocols. Some of it was not entirely wrong, because mold does dysregulate hormones in real and documented ways. But the framing was off. I was treating my body like it had a hormone problem when it had a toxin problem. The hormonal disruption was real, but it was downstream of something I had not found yet.
Here is what the research actually shows. Certain mycotoxins, particularly zearalenone (ZEA), a toxin produced by Fusarium mold species, structurally mimic estradiol, the body’s primary estrogen. They bind to estrogen receptors and disrupt hormone signaling from that level up. My own ZEA levels came back extremely elevated. Research published in PMC shows that ZEA and its metabolites can directly alter the production of estradiol, progesterone, and cortisol. A separate review found links between mycotoxin exposure and conditions including endometriosis, PCOS, and premature ovarian insufficiency. This is the biology behind why mold illness so convincingly presents as a hormone problem.
One practical note: Fusarium species are not captured on a standard ERMI test. You need to add Fusarium spp. through an ERMI-Plus to catch it.
Perimenopause and mold illness share a striking number of symptoms: disrupted sleep, anxiety, cognitive changes, mood shifts, fatigue, hormonal irregularity. For women in their late thirties and forties, mold almost always gets blamed on hormones because the age fits the story, and conventional medicine has a prescription ready for the hormone version and nothing to offer for the mold version.
If your perimenopause symptoms came on suddenly, are more neurological than typical, or are not responding to hormone support, ask whether there is an environmental piece that has not been investigated. The two can coexist. But one of them is a lot easier to miss.
What I Tried That Did Not Work Long Term
These are some of the tools I reached for during those four years. Several gave temporary relief. None of them resolved the underlying problem, because no intervention overcomes daily exposure to an active mold source.
- Ongoing detox protocols with drainage support
- Sauna
- Daily sinus rinses
- Castor oil packs
- Coffee enemas
- Lymphatic massage
- Detox baths
- Grounding sheets
- Scalar energy pyramid
- Vibro-acoustic sound bed sessions
A lot of this was aimed at the anxiety and nervous system dysregulation I was experiencing. That instinct was not wrong. Mold-driven neuroinflammation dysregulates the nervous system, and the anxiety I was feeling was biological, not psychological. But no nervous system support can override an active biotoxin exposure. You cannot calm a system that is being continuously provoked.
Detoxification without source removal is a leaky bucket. You are trying to clear what the body keeps accumulating. Living this myself made one of the core lessons of terrain-based medicine viscerally real: you cannot supplement or biohack your way out of an ongoing environmental exposure.
What This Means for Fertility Specifically
I work with women who are doing everything right and still not getting pregnant. Eating clean, sleeping reasonably well, taking the right supplements, managing stress, and still struggling. We live in a world where toxic burden is higher than it has ever been and resilience is correspondingly lower.
Mold is on my list now in a way it was not before. Here is why.
Progesterone and cortisol compete. Chronic biotoxin exposure keeps the stress response activated. Elevated cortisol suppresses progesterone, and progesterone is foundational for implantation and early pregnancy maintenance.
Inflammatory cytokines are embryo-hostile. Mold toxins drive systemic inflammation. An inflamed uterine environment is not a hospitable one for implantation.
Thyroid function suffers. Mycotoxins impair thyroid hormone conversion. Subclinical hypothyroidism is one of the more common and underdiagnosed contributors to infertility and early pregnancy loss.
Mitochondrial function matters for egg quality. Oocyte maturation is extraordinarily energy-intensive, and mitochondrial impairment from toxin exposure translates directly to egg quality issues. This post goes deeper on mitochondrial health and fertility.
Detox pathways overlap. An overwhelmed liver and gut have less capacity for hormone metabolism, so estrogen clearance suffers. Add in zearalenone’s direct estrogen receptor binding, and you get a compounded estrogenic load that looks like estrogen dominance but has nothing to do with your own hormone production. Metabolic dysfunction plays into this picture too.
Nobody Understood Me, Including My Own Household
My partner is a DO, a physician who has worked at a busy NYC practice for almost 25 years. He had no idea what was happening to me.
That is not a criticism of him. It is a criticism of medical training. Mold illness does not have a pharmaceutical fix, so it does not get covered in medical school. The illness is real, the research exists, and it is almost entirely absent from conventional medical training.
People with mold illness often get told their symptoms are stress, anxiety, depression, migraines, kidney or liver issues, perimenopause, or nothing at all. They get antidepressants. They get referred to therapists. They get told their labs are normal. Meanwhile they are being poisoned by their own home. We do not have enough doctors asking why.
I was gaslit by multiple people during those four years. That word gets overused, but it applies here. My symptoms were real. My suffering was real. And person after person, including people who cared about me, explained it away.
My landlord sent out a mold inspector who ran an air test and said nothing was wrong, the ducts just needed cleaning. He cleaned the ducts. That was it.
The worst was the handyman.
Last December, I finally noticed a leak on my bathroom ceiling, the first visible sign that something was actually wrong, four years into symptoms. A handyman came to assess it and insisted it was not a leak at all, just condensation from the shower, and began to plaster over it.
I pushed. I asked him to cut it open anyway. He did, and what came out looked like a dark grey sponge. The ceiling material was thick with mold. Stachybotrys and Chaetomium, two of the most toxic species. Black mold.
That moment was validating and infuriating in equal measure. I cried after he left, because after four years of searching I finally had an answer, and because what I had suspected for so long had finally been proven, and it took me forcing someone’s hand to get there.
What Remediation Actually Looked Like
Getting better was not a single event. It was a process, and it required persistence I should not have needed to have.
After the bathroom ceiling was remediated, my symptoms improved but did not resolve. I knew there was more. We had three separate flooding events in the basement over the four years we had lived there, and I suspected the walls had never fully dried out.
I had to convince my landlord to investigate further. A mold inspector ran a moisture test that came back dry. I pushed back, explaining that mycotoxins continue to be released from dry mold, often at even higher concentrations than from wet mold. He brought in a mold detection dog, which found multiple areas of concern, and eventually agreed to open the lower walls of the basement. The entire lower section had to be cut out and replaced with concrete board. That second round of remediation made the biggest difference. I am now almost completely better.
I say almost because I know there is still mold behind the shower tiles and under the flooring near the kitchen sink. Full resolution has not happened yet, and my body still knows it. The 25% of us who cannot clear these biotoxins efficiently are sensitive enough that partial remediation gives partial results. The body keeps score.
If you suspect mold, an ERMI test is a DNA-based dust analysis that identifies mold species present in the home, far more sensitive than a visual inspection or basic air quality test. I carry it in my supplement and testing shop for exactly this reason. And if zearalenone or other mycotoxins show up on a Toxin Zoomer test, order the ERMI-Plus and add on Fusarium spp. specifically, since standard ERMI testing will not catch it.
Once the source is addressed, supporting your detox pathways becomes the priority. I rely on CellCore for binder and drainage support during mold recovery, Queen of Thrones castor oil packs for liver drainage, and my Therasage infrared sauna for additional toxin clearance. And if you are a coffee drinker, switching to Purity Coffee, which is mold-free and tested, is a small but meaningful step toward reducing your overall mycotoxin load.
If you are working with a practitioner and your symptoms are not budging despite a solid protocol, investigate your environment. And if you are trying to conceive and cannot understand why your protocol or supplements are not working, add mold exposure to your differential.
How I Work With This Now
In my practice at shannonsouth.com, I take a terrain-based approach to fertility, meaning I am looking at the full physiological picture, not just the reproductive system in isolation. The environment you live and breathe in is part of your terrain. It always was. My own mold illness just made me a lot better at asking the right questions.
If you have been bouncing between practitioners, doing all the protocols, and still not seeing movement, let’s look at what else might be in the picture. Mold is one piece. It is not the only piece. But it is one I will not miss.
Sources
- Shoemaker RC, House DE. “Sick building syndrome (SBS) and exposure to water-damaged buildings: time series study, clinical trial and mechanisms.” Neurotoxicology and Teratology. 2006. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16962726/
- Hope J. “A review of the mechanism of injury and treatment approaches for illness resulting from exposure to water-damaged buildings, mold, and mycotoxins.” The Scientific World Journal. 2013. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/767482
- Somppi TL. “Non-Thyroidal Illness Syndrome in Patients Exposed to Indoor Air Dampness Microbiota Treated Successfully with Triiodothyronine.” Frontiers in Immunology. 2017. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.00919
- Bennett JW, Klich M. “Mycotoxins.” Clinical Microbiology Reviews. 2003. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12857779/
- EPA — Mold and Health: https://www.epa.gov/mold/mold-and-health
- Calisi A, et al. “Endocrine Effect of Some Mycotoxins on Humans: A Clinical Review of the Ways to Mitigate the Action of Mycotoxins.” PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10535190/
- “The Role of Mycotoxins in Reproductive Health: Mechanisms, Evidence, and Clinical Implications.” Journal of IVF-Worldwide. 2025. https://jivfww.scholasticahq.com/article/132398-the-role-of-mycotoxins-in-reproductive-health-mechanisms-evidence-and-clinical-implications
- Frizzell C, et al. “Endocrine activity of mycotoxins and mycotoxin mixtures.” Food and Chemical Toxicology. 2016. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278691516302629
- Karpeta-Kaczmarek J, et al. “Impact of Fusarium-Derived Mycoestrogens on Female Reproduction: A Systematic Review.” PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225184/
