When a Friend Got Sick in My House, I Finally Knew the Truth

The day everything snapped into focus, and why I’ll never ignore my body again

We thought it was parenting. Stress. Burnout. Then Tifanie stayed the night—and got sick.

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I knew something was wrong.
For a long time.

I had just convinced myself it was everything else,
Motherhood.
Lack of sleep.
Ben’s travel.
Hormones.
Not having community.
Normal stress.

We had been living in that house for four years.
Four years of compounding symptoms.
And four years of brushing them off.
Of blaming life. Of blaming ourselves.

Until one night, everything changed.

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My friend Tifanie (who went to school at the National University of Natural Medicine) came to church with Sunny and me.
She stayed over that Sunday night, slept in my room upstairs, nowhere near the basement.
Just the living room. The kitchen. My bedroom.
The places we lived our entire lives in, every single day.

Tifanie got sick, the next day.
She had previously been exposed to black mold, so her body was extra attuned to its symptoms… she said to me:

“Caley, I think your house has mold. You should get it checked.”

She didn’t even know what I had been going through.
She just felt it in her own body.

And something in me snapped to attention.
There was this full-body ping,
like the truth had been sitting in the shadows, waiting for someone else to say it out loud.

I knew.
I knew.

That was the moment.
The moment everything started making sense.

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We didn’t hesitate.
Ben and I reached out to a professional mold company in Portland and scheduled testing right away.
We didn’t even test our bodies yet, we needed to know if it was in the house first.

And when those results came back…
Five types of toxic mold.
Two types of black mold.
Toxic. Confirmed.

That was when the shock hit.
And right behind it… relief.

Because it meant I wasn’t crazy.
I wasn’t just failing at life.
It wasn’t just parenting. Or stress. Or not having enough energy.

There was a reason I felt like I was slowly dying.
And now I had proof.

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But what do you do when you finally have answers,
and the people responsible don’t care?

Our landlords did nothing.
They dismissed us. Dragged their feet. Gave us silence or excuses.
Treated us like we were overreacting.

It’s hard to describe how awful that feels.
To know your home is hurting your family,
and to be met with gaslighting and indifference.

To be treated like you’re exaggerating when you’re standing in the middle of your life falling apart.

That was one of the hardest parts.
The loneliness.
The feeling of being invisible inside someone else’s apathy.

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But I’ll never forget that day.
The day Tifanie got sick in our house.
The moment she said those words,
And the truth rose up in my body like a tidal wave:

This is it.

That moment saved me.
Because it reminded me that my body had been speaking to me all along.
I just hadn’t been listening.

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I’ve got so much more to share from this chapter;
how we started detoxing, what that actually looks like,
what’s helped, what hasn’t, and where we are now.

But for today, I just want to leave you with this:

If something in your body is whispering…
Listen.

Because sometimes it takes someone else getting sick in your space
to realize you’ve been sick there all along.

With love,
Caley

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P.S. I’ll be sharing the start of my mold detox process soon—what I’ve been doing, what’s helping, and how I’m approaching it spiritually and physically. If you’re interested, you can reply or comment to let me know you want it.