by Duane N. Burghard
©2015
Before I start, I need to apologize to my regular readers and explain the reasons for my several weeks long hiatus from writing this blog. There are three reasons for my disappearance. The first reason is because a very important and very cool thing has happened: I have finally finished and now published my first novel (Gopto). Unfortunately, getting it ready for publishing, production etc. ended up consuming basically all of the time that I normally dedicate to my blog. Finishing the novel and having it published is a BIG deal in my life and I'm VERY excited. You will see ads for the book soon and there will probably be a number of upcoming blog posts where I talk about it.
The second reason is a little more complex. The fact is that my recent essays focused on my business life have not been nearly as popular as those which preceded it. To be clear, I have intentionally spent these first six months as a blogger writing about a wide variety of topics. I wanted a high level of diversity in subject matter so that I could learn what "works" with people who like my writing style (and what doesn't). An unfortunate side effect of my strategy is that one audience would find my blog because of one essay they like, but then I would move on to something different and they would go away. The series I've been working on lately (my business story) is, evidently, a lot less interesting to my core readers than essays like "Umbrellas, Spaghetti and Spacetime," or "How I Came To Be Interrogated By Soviet Authorities At Age 11." The message is now pretty clear: I need to get back to writing the sorts of things that "worked" for many of my readers.
Finally, the third reason for my delay is that this particular story is a lot harder one to tell. I will try to tell it with as much humor and lightness as I can, but this chapter of my life contains a pretty serious, life threatening and life changing illness. It permanently changed my life and I sometimes find it difficult to find the right way to "frame" it as a story. In any case, the experience is also an excellent opportunity to "skip to the end" of my business story and morph it into the story of how this particular illness reshaped my life and led me to my current home in Tucson, Arizona.
As always, thank you for visiting and reading my blog. My normal blog will resume next week, and I promise to focus more on the things the majority of you have found interesting.
Now ... where were we? Oh yes ......
The second reason is a little more complex. The fact is that my recent essays focused on my business life have not been nearly as popular as those which preceded it. To be clear, I have intentionally spent these first six months as a blogger writing about a wide variety of topics. I wanted a high level of diversity in subject matter so that I could learn what "works" with people who like my writing style (and what doesn't). An unfortunate side effect of my strategy is that one audience would find my blog because of one essay they like, but then I would move on to something different and they would go away. The series I've been working on lately (my business story) is, evidently, a lot less interesting to my core readers than essays like "Umbrellas, Spaghetti and Spacetime," or "How I Came To Be Interrogated By Soviet Authorities At Age 11." The message is now pretty clear: I need to get back to writing the sorts of things that "worked" for many of my readers.
Finally, the third reason for my delay is that this particular story is a lot harder one to tell. I will try to tell it with as much humor and lightness as I can, but this chapter of my life contains a pretty serious, life threatening and life changing illness. It permanently changed my life and I sometimes find it difficult to find the right way to "frame" it as a story. In any case, the experience is also an excellent opportunity to "skip to the end" of my business story and morph it into the story of how this particular illness reshaped my life and led me to my current home in Tucson, Arizona.
As always, thank you for visiting and reading my blog. My normal blog will resume next week, and I promise to focus more on the things the majority of you have found interesting.
Now ... where were we? Oh yes ......
“We’re goin’ to the End of The Line” (apologies to my beloved Traveling Wilburys)
As I noted in the last chapter, by the spring of 2001, about a year after renovations had turned more than half of our house into office space, the business was continuing to grow and Mara and I were realizing that, even though we had rarely used the rooms in our house that had now been 100% taken over by the business as office space, we still had in fact used them from time to time and we did in fact want to have that space. Additionally, there really wasn't any more space in the building to put any more people (unless we wanted to give up the kitchen (which was already shared with employees) or the bedrooms ... no). So we faced the reality that we had simply outgrown the house and began looking for a new one. On a whim, while driving around and house hunting one day, we turned in to a neighborhood and began driving along a street that served as a dam for a lake. Across the lake were several large, beautiful homes, one had an enormous dock on the lake. And I thought to myself, “I wonder how old I’ll be when I can afford a place like that.” I have simply GOT to STOP asking questions like that because, as we pulled around the corner and by that street, we both saw, to our stunned amazement, that the exact house we were dreaming about was for sale. As a JOKE, I decided that we should pull up. I fully expected the price to be WAY out of our range, and wanted to look at it, show it to Mara, have a laugh, and move on. What I saw stopped me cold. It was just outside what we thought our range was, but from the sticker over the price on the brochure, it had already just come down $20K. My immediate thought was, “OK, what’s wrong with it?” So we walked around and looked in the windows etc. It was decorated in a very mod style (which is to say it looked like what we envisioned the 21st Century would look like back in the late 1970s ... odd given that the home was built in the late 80s, but whatever). We called the realtor (an occasional client of ours) to inquire about it and discovered that they had just dropped the price another $10K that day. It was now at the VERY high end of our range, but it was there. The house was well more than twice as large as our existing house. It had a 1,500 square foot plus walk out basement where we (correctly) estimated we could have up to 6 additional employees working without causing space problems. Our logic in making an offer was that, while it was more than the “next logical step” house we were looking for, it was the “End of the Line” house, the house we could live in for 20-30 years and retire from. Obviously we had no way of knowing how close it would be to becoming my “End of the Line” house in a far more literal (mortal) way. The sellers were desperate, they took our price and even agreed to let us rent the place for a month as a trial ownership period (and apply the rent to the purchase price).
What happened on the last week of the trial period was one of those completely bizarre moments that happen in life. At the time it seemed like a pretty hilarious and minor hiccup, but it very nearly cost me my life. The house had a water softener that clearly hadn’t been used in years, and I called a plumber to come look at what it would take to reactivate it (as well as some other items). When he arrived, we went to the utility room. The small closet which housed the water main as well as the water softener was on the far side of this utility room. There was an odd sound coming from the closet, and as I opened the door, and you couldn’t write something this slapstick funny, a stream of water literally shot out the door and began striking me in the face (soaking both me and my clothes obviously). The water main came through the foundation wall at about my eye height, and sometime shortly before the plumber arrived, the foundation had moved just enough to tear open the main pipe. As a result, the pressure of the water shooting through the narrow opening in the foundation was significant. In one of the truly comic moments of my life, I quickly slammed the door, looked at the plumber and said, “OK, that is NOT why I asked you to come out today.” The plumber quickly ran to the street and cut off the water coming to the house, but the seeds of my next near death experience had already been sown. The floor of the utility room suffered extensive water damage. The floor was pergo, wood ... very unusual for a utility room, but the previous owner’s son had been a musician and had converted the room in to a recording studio (he had laid the wood floor for acoustic reasons). The other piece of this tragic puzzle came several years before we ever saw the house. The house (more specifically, its driveway) sits on a curve on the road. The road and the driveway are both concrete, and the concrete was, unfortunately continuous. As a result, during the summer months, as the concrete in the road and driveway expanded, it would shove a good portion of the house (the garage to be precise) off its foundation. Over the years, the house had been moved by a couple of inches, more than enough to allow moisture to get into the walls in the portion of the basement under the garage. Over time, the insulation and drywall became infested with a particular type of mold. The mold is called Stachybotrys or stachy (pronounced “stacky”) for short. Stachy is bad for all humans, but it’s quite literally lethal to about of 15% of us (you know where this is going now). With spores in the air, and a wet wood floor, it was only a matter of time.
As the summer ended and fall began, we began closing up the house more and more, and then we started turning the heat on. The spores began blowing around the house. It's very hard for me to talk about and write about this part of the experience, not because it's so painful (although it's not pleasant) but because I literally don't remember a lot of it. I remember losing my voice, but it was fall and I figured I just had a cold. But then I started losing my mind, which is to say, I started losing access to my memory. This is a big deal because those who know me know that I have something FAR more than a normal memory. In fact, let's take a momentary diversion to find out how I knew that.
In the fall of 1984, the University of Missouri had one of their on campus job fairs. This particular fair was held along my Tuesday/Thursday walking route between classes. One of the vendors at the fair was the CIA, and as I walked by, the recruiter asked me if I had a moment to take a quick test. The test consisted of a reading sample and a few questions. I took the test, completed it and handed it back to him. He looked at it and then asked me if I would stop back by in two days. Since I knew I would be in the same place at the same time (same class schedule) I said sure. On Thursday, right on schedule, I showed up and the gentleman asked me to take a very similar but slightly different test, which I did ... and after he graded it he asked me if I would quietly step aside with him so he could talk to me about a career in the CIA. He explained to me what the purpose of the test was, and that it identified me as having a particular type of mind that they look for in researchers. He described the job of the researchers and I said, "like Robert Redford in Three Days Of The Condor?" and he said "yes," (in retrospect I think its odd that he would admit that since he must have been able to guess that I would then know that all of Redford's friends in that movie who are doing research jobs like the one he was telling me about ended up getting killed in the movie). We spoke for nearly an hour. He took the time to talk to me about how my mind could be trained to do far more than I was doing naturally. He then took the time to actually teach me a couple of mental games that I still play to this day to sharpen my memory skills and to pull information out of my head. The offer was frankly tempting, and their financial aid package was WAY more than what I was receiving from my NROTC scholarship ... but I didn't much care for the idea that I would have a super secret job that I could never talk to anyone about. Additionally, I did actually have some fear about working for the CIA. But ultimately, the fact was that I felt loyalty to the Navy and all of my friends in it and all that the staff at our unit had done to secure my full scholarship (and I had NO idea how easy it would have been to get out of it). After several post event phone calls etc., I thanked the recruiter for all he had done for me, and politely declined the offer. But I never forgot what he told me about my mind and what I could do. I had always known that I had a much stronger and more powerful memory than most people, but now I knew what it was, why, and how to better train and use it.
On November 4, 2001, I was watching the Chicago Bears play the Cleveland Browns. With about 3 minutes to play, the Brows scored a touchdown to go up 21-7. The game was OVER. So over that the announcers were listing and thanking the crew and wrapping up while the Bears were on their final drive. With 30 seconds to play, the Bears scored, making it 21-14. They recovered the onside kick and, as time expired, they scored AGAIN, tying the score at 21. They lost the overtime coin flip, but in that first Browns possession, the Bears defense scored on a "pick six" and won the game 27-21. It was one of the most insane finishes to a game I have ever seen.
And it's the very last memory I have for a VERY long time.
I can't tell you much about 2002. I remember having to fire an employee. I remember the birth of my daughter Jordan and helping my wife through labor. I remember getting into a really emotional argument with my Apple rep. But other than that. Nothing. For a man who can pull so many facts from his life out of his mind in incredible detail, I can't tell you basically anything about that entire year. I know that I was scared out of my mind. I know that I could barely talk. The poison in the house was causing the tissues around my vocal chords to essentially dissolve (and the area below my jaws was sensitive and ached constantly), so I had the ability to speak for about 30-60 minutes per day (which was incredibly hard on the business of course), but more importantly, I couldn't remember anything. In the years since all of this happened I have become friends with a prominent Neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri (our youngest daughters were best friends for years). He took an interest in my case and concluded that something about the toxin was keeping my brain from turning short term memories into long term ones, and only the especially traumatic or emotionally powerful stuff (e.g. Jordan's birth) got through.
Other family members and employees never got sick, so we didn't suspect the house. The Doctors I saw were confused. They had me taking very expensive and powerful medication for months on end. It kept me from getting worse and allowed me to work, but I got no better.
In January of 2003, we made our regular trip to visit Mara's sister out on the island of Hawaii. It was my third vacation since becoming ill. Each time I went on vacation I would seem to get noticeably better, but that seemed only logical (away from the stress of work? in Hawaii? duh!). But when we returned home from the trip, that very first night, I began to reel awful again right away ... and for the first time, I wasn't alone. Our then 3 1/2 month old daughter Jordan, who hadn't been sick a day in her life, showed signs of being sick. And even in my weakened state, I remember that being the day that I I thought, "it's in the house."
I contacted the EPA, and they put me in touch with an air quality testing firm. The firm came to Columbia a few days later. The man conducting the test walked in, and was in the house only seconds before saying, "I know what this is, and you've got it pretty bad." I've now been well for many years, and for the record, I can now do the same thing ... I can walk into your home and tell you within MOMENTS if your house is infected with stachybotrys.
Three days later I was up in Kirksville doing some onsite work for an important client. As I left the parking lot, my phone rang. It was the EPA guy. "Mr. Burghard, we have the test results from your home sir, and, well, we don't think you should go home tonight." Well THAT got my attention. They then told me that they were faxing the results to my ENT Doctor. The Doctor's office called me less than 10 minutes later and said "Dr. Denninghoff would like to see you first thing tomorrow morning." When I walked in he had the results in his hand. He said, "you know, a ton of people think they have this and don't, but you, this is the first thing that makes sense, THIS is what's wrong."
Within weeks we had a significant section of the house completely gutted. And more. The special contractors who did the removal washed down the concrete foundation with some kind of chemical wash, and they left a very odd device that had a particular type of light and made loud clicking noises running 24/7 for several days. Then the rebuilding began. I was militant about never allowing anything like this to happen to me or anyone who ever owned this house again. We installed a special "vapor barrier" along all wall and floor surfaces. The framing was done with pressure treated, mold resistant studs. The sheetrock was a special "greenrock" that is specially made to be mold resistant. Everything we did was focused on not just fixing the problem, but making sure it never happened again. In the end, it was about $25,000 worth of work (and that doesn't count the sweat equity of finishing work that we did ourselves), but when we had the EPA testing firm back out to test the results, they found less stachybotrys in the house than was naturally occurring in the air outside the house (and that is when you know you have it beat).
My health began to improve rapidly. Within 6 weeks I was on about 1/60th of the power of the medication I had been on (and very quickly down to just over the counter drugs to deal with the remnants). And on March 31, 2003, as I was driving back to the office at 8:30am after dropping Taylor at her nursery school, I pulled up to the corner of Forum and Stadium, and Jackson Brown's "Lawyers In Love" started playing on the radio. As I sat at the red light it suddenly occurred to me that I was singing the song in my head along with the music ... and I knew the words! I immediately began taking inventory of my "mind palace" quizzing myself relentlessly about whatever obscure details I could think of ... and it was back! All of it! Just like that, in a single moment, suddenly I had access to my mind again. And I started to cry.
It was the scariest experience of my life.
Yes, I did. So, what the heck does all of THAT have to do with how I got to Tucson? Well, as I said, with the house successfully remediated (and we sold it a year later ... mostly because the business had once again grown beyond those 6 more employees we figured on when we bought it), I got better fast. My medication bill quickly went from $300-400/month to about $60/month. My voice returned, my mind returned, I got better ... but I never did get all the way better. Now, I had been warned by my Doctor that some of my voice loss might very well be permanent (and in fact I did lose about 5 notes off the top of my singing voice range ... although oddly enough I picked up three more on the low end), and I had been further warned that it would take up to five years or more for me to really feel normal again, but since I was pretty close to normal within just a few months, I kind of accepted where I was as "the new normal." And the medication I needed was over the counter and cheap, so I kind of just accepted it and moved on.
In the fall of 2007, I attended the annual ASMC Conference in Tucson, Arizona (the ASMC is a consortium corporation of Apple Dealers and I sat on the company's Board of Directors for six years). It had now been four and a half years since we had discovered and removed the stachybotrys, and the fact that I was still on any medication was frankly annoying and bothersome to me. Periodically I would try to stop, and I'd invariably last a few days before I began to feel awful again, and then I'd restart ... but by the third day of the conference in Tucson, I felt so good that I forgot to take my medication ... and it literally wasn't until the day I left (day 5) that I noticed and realized that I had continued to feel not just fine, but really great.
Hilariously, I did not make the connection between my health and my location ... although, in fairness to me, I obviously did notice that I felt better. My rationale for the improvement came from my conversation with my Doctor years earlier (he said it would take about 5 years, and it had in fact been about about 5 years, so I thought, "that must be it").
I returned back to Missouri and, after a few days, felt the need to go back to the medication again, but now, instead of taking something every day, I was taking something every 2-3 days or so. This again was the "new normal"
I received a call from another Apple dealer in the summer of 2009. He had spoken with his Apple rep who had advised and encouraged him to contact me. His family had sold their company (a large electronics and household goods business, which included the Apple dealership) a couple of years earlier, and the company they sold out to had driven their business into the ground and into bankruptcy, so this person's family had come back and bought the company back from the Bankruptcy Court. However, in rebuilding their business, they didn't feel that they had the time, effort, energy or money necessary to rebuild everything at the same time, so essentially they wanted to outsource the Apple part of their stores to me. I, of course, was happy to help. A side effect of this takeover, however, meant that I would now be traveling to New Mexico (the two stores in question were in Albuquerque and Santa Fe) several times per year.
On my fourth trip to Albuquerque, I was paying particular attention to my mood and health ... and I was doing that because on my prior trip I thought I noticed that I seemed to be in an unusually good mood while I was in New Mexico, and that seemed to have happened before. Sure enough, after about 6 hours on the ground, I began to feel noticeably better. I felt healthier, stronger, I was in a better mood ... in just about every way I felt better. I called my wife and reported that, at this point, it seemed unlikely that this was a coincidence (I said something like, "look, I like Albuquerque, but I don't think I like it THAT much ... I think something else is happening here."
So a week or so later I made an appointment to go see my old ENT Doctor. I told him what I experienced, that it seemed like each time I went to New Mexico I would be there for something like half a day, and I would suddenly start feeling physically, mentally and emotionally better. He looked at me without emotion and said, "well, yeah, that makes sense."
Did you ever have one of those moments in life where someone says something and then there's a silent pause after that because what that person has just said makes complete and total sense to them but no sense at all to you? That's what this moment was like for me. After a long pause I said, "why is that?" The Doctor noted that I had suffered from stachybotrys poisoning years earlier. I said I knew that. He said, "well, some of the remnants of that are going to be in your bloodstream for the rest of your life."
"OK," I replied.
"Well," he said, "it's a toxin that gets all of its strength from moisture, so the drier the climate you're in, the less it will be able to mess with you and the better you'll feel." I had read a LOT about stachybotrys by this point. I knew that its global "superhome" if you will is in the Mississippi River Valley (it's worst down in the New Orleans and Deep South areas, but it comes all the way up into the midwest, and certainly into central Missouri). And by this time I had developed quite the schnoz for detecting it (like the inspector who came to our home years ago, as I noted above, I now knew exactly what it smelled like and could immediately feel its affects on me). But I had sort of assumed that some of it was pretty much everywhere. The idea that there were environments on Earth that were so hostile to it that it basically didn't exist hadn't frankly occurred to me until that moment.
"That makes sense," I said. Then, after a pause I added, "you know Doc ... um, just for future reference, that's a tidbit of information I probably could have had years ago." Important life lesson: what's intuitively obvious to you is not necessarily intuitively obvious to those around you.
I went home that night and said to my wife, "I love it here in Mid-Missouri. We've built our lives and our business here. We've raised our kids here, this is home ... but we live once, and if I can be that much better somewhere else, we should go." Ironically, she was as ready or more ready to go than I was.
We took the children to New Mexico during their Spring Break in 2012. We looked around Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Rio Rancho etc. and saw a lot of nice places. The girls all pretty obviously hated it. Oh well. The next year (2013), my Dad offered to take us and our children on a weeklong San Diego to Puerto Vallarta Spring Break cruise (he had done the same for the children of my siblings but not us), so we said sure ... and I asked the family if we could take 1-2 days on the way home and have a look at Arizona ... which we did ... and when we got to Tucson, we got the first "hey, this is nice" reaction from everyone ... and that was pretty much how Tucson became the target. We moved to Tucson in August of 2013. Our house is literally just down the road from the resort where the ASMC Conference was held in 2007 (total coincidence, had NO idea until after we bought it ... funny how life does stuff like that to you). I do miss things about Missouri, but the fact is that I'm much healthier and much happier here. The desert isn't right for everyone, but if ANYTHING I've written above about my experience sounds familiar to you. PLEASE have your house checked for stachybotrys and/or aspergillus IMMEDIATELY. I also recommend just visiting Tucson sometime. Come down for a few days, see how you feel (and if you hate the cold, as I do, pick sometime when it's really cold where you are and come enjoy the sun and comparative warmth we have to offer).
And by the way, several people who have come to visit us since we've moved here have also decided to move here. This wasn't the primary reason that my wife finally left our company and became a realtor with Keller Williams this year, but in case you come and want to stay, I know someone who would love to help!
And THAT is how I came to Tucson. Next week my blog will return with a completely new essay.
As the summer ended and fall began, we began closing up the house more and more, and then we started turning the heat on. The spores began blowing around the house. It's very hard for me to talk about and write about this part of the experience, not because it's so painful (although it's not pleasant) but because I literally don't remember a lot of it. I remember losing my voice, but it was fall and I figured I just had a cold. But then I started losing my mind, which is to say, I started losing access to my memory. This is a big deal because those who know me know that I have something FAR more than a normal memory. In fact, let's take a momentary diversion to find out how I knew that.
“We’d like to talk to you about a career in the CIA" ....
In the fall of 1984, the University of Missouri had one of their on campus job fairs. This particular fair was held along my Tuesday/Thursday walking route between classes. One of the vendors at the fair was the CIA, and as I walked by, the recruiter asked me if I had a moment to take a quick test. The test consisted of a reading sample and a few questions. I took the test, completed it and handed it back to him. He looked at it and then asked me if I would stop back by in two days. Since I knew I would be in the same place at the same time (same class schedule) I said sure. On Thursday, right on schedule, I showed up and the gentleman asked me to take a very similar but slightly different test, which I did ... and after he graded it he asked me if I would quietly step aside with him so he could talk to me about a career in the CIA. He explained to me what the purpose of the test was, and that it identified me as having a particular type of mind that they look for in researchers. He described the job of the researchers and I said, "like Robert Redford in Three Days Of The Condor?" and he said "yes," (in retrospect I think its odd that he would admit that since he must have been able to guess that I would then know that all of Redford's friends in that movie who are doing research jobs like the one he was telling me about ended up getting killed in the movie). We spoke for nearly an hour. He took the time to talk to me about how my mind could be trained to do far more than I was doing naturally. He then took the time to actually teach me a couple of mental games that I still play to this day to sharpen my memory skills and to pull information out of my head. The offer was frankly tempting, and their financial aid package was WAY more than what I was receiving from my NROTC scholarship ... but I didn't much care for the idea that I would have a super secret job that I could never talk to anyone about. Additionally, I did actually have some fear about working for the CIA. But ultimately, the fact was that I felt loyalty to the Navy and all of my friends in it and all that the staff at our unit had done to secure my full scholarship (and I had NO idea how easy it would have been to get out of it). After several post event phone calls etc., I thanked the recruiter for all he had done for me, and politely declined the offer. But I never forgot what he told me about my mind and what I could do. I had always known that I had a much stronger and more powerful memory than most people, but now I knew what it was, why, and how to better train and use it.
On November 4, 2001, I was watching the Chicago Bears play the Cleveland Browns. With about 3 minutes to play, the Brows scored a touchdown to go up 21-7. The game was OVER. So over that the announcers were listing and thanking the crew and wrapping up while the Bears were on their final drive. With 30 seconds to play, the Bears scored, making it 21-14. They recovered the onside kick and, as time expired, they scored AGAIN, tying the score at 21. They lost the overtime coin flip, but in that first Browns possession, the Bears defense scored on a "pick six" and won the game 27-21. It was one of the most insane finishes to a game I have ever seen.
And it's the very last memory I have for a VERY long time.
I can't tell you much about 2002. I remember having to fire an employee. I remember the birth of my daughter Jordan and helping my wife through labor. I remember getting into a really emotional argument with my Apple rep. But other than that. Nothing. For a man who can pull so many facts from his life out of his mind in incredible detail, I can't tell you basically anything about that entire year. I know that I was scared out of my mind. I know that I could barely talk. The poison in the house was causing the tissues around my vocal chords to essentially dissolve (and the area below my jaws was sensitive and ached constantly), so I had the ability to speak for about 30-60 minutes per day (which was incredibly hard on the business of course), but more importantly, I couldn't remember anything. In the years since all of this happened I have become friends with a prominent Neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri (our youngest daughters were best friends for years). He took an interest in my case and concluded that something about the toxin was keeping my brain from turning short term memories into long term ones, and only the especially traumatic or emotionally powerful stuff (e.g. Jordan's birth) got through.
Other family members and employees never got sick, so we didn't suspect the house. The Doctors I saw were confused. They had me taking very expensive and powerful medication for months on end. It kept me from getting worse and allowed me to work, but I got no better.
In January of 2003, we made our regular trip to visit Mara's sister out on the island of Hawaii. It was my third vacation since becoming ill. Each time I went on vacation I would seem to get noticeably better, but that seemed only logical (away from the stress of work? in Hawaii? duh!). But when we returned home from the trip, that very first night, I began to reel awful again right away ... and for the first time, I wasn't alone. Our then 3 1/2 month old daughter Jordan, who hadn't been sick a day in her life, showed signs of being sick. And even in my weakened state, I remember that being the day that I I thought, "it's in the house."
I contacted the EPA, and they put me in touch with an air quality testing firm. The firm came to Columbia a few days later. The man conducting the test walked in, and was in the house only seconds before saying, "I know what this is, and you've got it pretty bad." I've now been well for many years, and for the record, I can now do the same thing ... I can walk into your home and tell you within MOMENTS if your house is infected with stachybotrys.
Three days later I was up in Kirksville doing some onsite work for an important client. As I left the parking lot, my phone rang. It was the EPA guy. "Mr. Burghard, we have the test results from your home sir, and, well, we don't think you should go home tonight." Well THAT got my attention. They then told me that they were faxing the results to my ENT Doctor. The Doctor's office called me less than 10 minutes later and said "Dr. Denninghoff would like to see you first thing tomorrow morning." When I walked in he had the results in his hand. He said, "you know, a ton of people think they have this and don't, but you, this is the first thing that makes sense, THIS is what's wrong."
Within weeks we had a significant section of the house completely gutted. And more. The special contractors who did the removal washed down the concrete foundation with some kind of chemical wash, and they left a very odd device that had a particular type of light and made loud clicking noises running 24/7 for several days. Then the rebuilding began. I was militant about never allowing anything like this to happen to me or anyone who ever owned this house again. We installed a special "vapor barrier" along all wall and floor surfaces. The framing was done with pressure treated, mold resistant studs. The sheetrock was a special "greenrock" that is specially made to be mold resistant. Everything we did was focused on not just fixing the problem, but making sure it never happened again. In the end, it was about $25,000 worth of work (and that doesn't count the sweat equity of finishing work that we did ourselves), but when we had the EPA testing firm back out to test the results, they found less stachybotrys in the house than was naturally occurring in the air outside the house (and that is when you know you have it beat).
My health began to improve rapidly. Within 6 weeks I was on about 1/60th of the power of the medication I had been on (and very quickly down to just over the counter drugs to deal with the remnants). And on March 31, 2003, as I was driving back to the office at 8:30am after dropping Taylor at her nursery school, I pulled up to the corner of Forum and Stadium, and Jackson Brown's "Lawyers In Love" started playing on the radio. As I sat at the red light it suddenly occurred to me that I was singing the song in my head along with the music ... and I knew the words! I immediately began taking inventory of my "mind palace" quizzing myself relentlessly about whatever obscure details I could think of ... and it was back! All of it! Just like that, in a single moment, suddenly I had access to my mind again. And I started to cry.
It was the scariest experience of my life.
“Didn't you say something about Tucson?" ....
Yes, I did. So, what the heck does all of THAT have to do with how I got to Tucson? Well, as I said, with the house successfully remediated (and we sold it a year later ... mostly because the business had once again grown beyond those 6 more employees we figured on when we bought it), I got better fast. My medication bill quickly went from $300-400/month to about $60/month. My voice returned, my mind returned, I got better ... but I never did get all the way better. Now, I had been warned by my Doctor that some of my voice loss might very well be permanent (and in fact I did lose about 5 notes off the top of my singing voice range ... although oddly enough I picked up three more on the low end), and I had been further warned that it would take up to five years or more for me to really feel normal again, but since I was pretty close to normal within just a few months, I kind of accepted where I was as "the new normal." And the medication I needed was over the counter and cheap, so I kind of just accepted it and moved on.
In the fall of 2007, I attended the annual ASMC Conference in Tucson, Arizona (the ASMC is a consortium corporation of Apple Dealers and I sat on the company's Board of Directors for six years). It had now been four and a half years since we had discovered and removed the stachybotrys, and the fact that I was still on any medication was frankly annoying and bothersome to me. Periodically I would try to stop, and I'd invariably last a few days before I began to feel awful again, and then I'd restart ... but by the third day of the conference in Tucson, I felt so good that I forgot to take my medication ... and it literally wasn't until the day I left (day 5) that I noticed and realized that I had continued to feel not just fine, but really great.
Hilariously, I did not make the connection between my health and my location ... although, in fairness to me, I obviously did notice that I felt better. My rationale for the improvement came from my conversation with my Doctor years earlier (he said it would take about 5 years, and it had in fact been about about 5 years, so I thought, "that must be it").
I returned back to Missouri and, after a few days, felt the need to go back to the medication again, but now, instead of taking something every day, I was taking something every 2-3 days or so. This again was the "new normal"
“Would you like to take over a couple of stores?" ....
I received a call from another Apple dealer in the summer of 2009. He had spoken with his Apple rep who had advised and encouraged him to contact me. His family had sold their company (a large electronics and household goods business, which included the Apple dealership) a couple of years earlier, and the company they sold out to had driven their business into the ground and into bankruptcy, so this person's family had come back and bought the company back from the Bankruptcy Court. However, in rebuilding their business, they didn't feel that they had the time, effort, energy or money necessary to rebuild everything at the same time, so essentially they wanted to outsource the Apple part of their stores to me. I, of course, was happy to help. A side effect of this takeover, however, meant that I would now be traveling to New Mexico (the two stores in question were in Albuquerque and Santa Fe) several times per year.
On my fourth trip to Albuquerque, I was paying particular attention to my mood and health ... and I was doing that because on my prior trip I thought I noticed that I seemed to be in an unusually good mood while I was in New Mexico, and that seemed to have happened before. Sure enough, after about 6 hours on the ground, I began to feel noticeably better. I felt healthier, stronger, I was in a better mood ... in just about every way I felt better. I called my wife and reported that, at this point, it seemed unlikely that this was a coincidence (I said something like, "look, I like Albuquerque, but I don't think I like it THAT much ... I think something else is happening here."
So a week or so later I made an appointment to go see my old ENT Doctor. I told him what I experienced, that it seemed like each time I went to New Mexico I would be there for something like half a day, and I would suddenly start feeling physically, mentally and emotionally better. He looked at me without emotion and said, "well, yeah, that makes sense."
Did you ever have one of those moments in life where someone says something and then there's a silent pause after that because what that person has just said makes complete and total sense to them but no sense at all to you? That's what this moment was like for me. After a long pause I said, "why is that?" The Doctor noted that I had suffered from stachybotrys poisoning years earlier. I said I knew that. He said, "well, some of the remnants of that are going to be in your bloodstream for the rest of your life."
"OK," I replied.
"Well," he said, "it's a toxin that gets all of its strength from moisture, so the drier the climate you're in, the less it will be able to mess with you and the better you'll feel." I had read a LOT about stachybotrys by this point. I knew that its global "superhome" if you will is in the Mississippi River Valley (it's worst down in the New Orleans and Deep South areas, but it comes all the way up into the midwest, and certainly into central Missouri). And by this time I had developed quite the schnoz for detecting it (like the inspector who came to our home years ago, as I noted above, I now knew exactly what it smelled like and could immediately feel its affects on me). But I had sort of assumed that some of it was pretty much everywhere. The idea that there were environments on Earth that were so hostile to it that it basically didn't exist hadn't frankly occurred to me until that moment.
"That makes sense," I said. Then, after a pause I added, "you know Doc ... um, just for future reference, that's a tidbit of information I probably could have had years ago." Important life lesson: what's intuitively obvious to you is not necessarily intuitively obvious to those around you.
I went home that night and said to my wife, "I love it here in Mid-Missouri. We've built our lives and our business here. We've raised our kids here, this is home ... but we live once, and if I can be that much better somewhere else, we should go." Ironically, she was as ready or more ready to go than I was.
We took the children to New Mexico during their Spring Break in 2012. We looked around Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Rio Rancho etc. and saw a lot of nice places. The girls all pretty obviously hated it. Oh well. The next year (2013), my Dad offered to take us and our children on a weeklong San Diego to Puerto Vallarta Spring Break cruise (he had done the same for the children of my siblings but not us), so we said sure ... and I asked the family if we could take 1-2 days on the way home and have a look at Arizona ... which we did ... and when we got to Tucson, we got the first "hey, this is nice" reaction from everyone ... and that was pretty much how Tucson became the target. We moved to Tucson in August of 2013. Our house is literally just down the road from the resort where the ASMC Conference was held in 2007 (total coincidence, had NO idea until after we bought it ... funny how life does stuff like that to you). I do miss things about Missouri, but the fact is that I'm much healthier and much happier here. The desert isn't right for everyone, but if ANYTHING I've written above about my experience sounds familiar to you. PLEASE have your house checked for stachybotrys and/or aspergillus IMMEDIATELY. I also recommend just visiting Tucson sometime. Come down for a few days, see how you feel (and if you hate the cold, as I do, pick sometime when it's really cold where you are and come enjoy the sun and comparative warmth we have to offer).
And by the way, several people who have come to visit us since we've moved here have also decided to move here. This wasn't the primary reason that my wife finally left our company and became a realtor with Keller Williams this year, but in case you come and want to stay, I know someone who would love to help!
And THAT is how I came to Tucson. Next week my blog will return with a completely new essay.
No comments:
Post a Comment