CHAPTER 25, continued
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It was High Noon. Everyone involved was on edge. Waiting for this fight was unnerving—just like what the hero feels in a high- tension movie thriller.

If the school officials were right that the massive fungal contamination was cleaned up, then no one would get sick again. If the school were still contaminated, then the volunteers would be sickened quickly. As it turns out, the school officials were wrong, nearly dead wrong, in Pat’s case. And they were wrong to assume she would be alone in this shoot-out.

Fisher Haines had done well away from school. He’d had no allergy problems, no cough and so no medications were needed.

He’d received one hour each day of home instruction, but really missed seeing his friends at school. Carolyn tried hard to be both a Mom and a Teacher, but she also had two other young children who needed her. Fisher should have been in school, safe from mold attacks.

He came to Pocomoke for a final evaluation. Carolyn was scared.

“The board says Fisher can come back to school and everything w ill be fine,” she said. “But I saw what happened to him before, and now again to Pat. It’s all a bunch of lies!”

Fisher took the VCS test. It was normal, just like when he was treated with CSM and out of the school before. His physical exam was normal. Thankfully, his MMP9, a measure of inflammation caused by exposure to toxins, was 194, a marked improvement from the profoundly sick level of 450 he’d had when he was first ill. Carolyn didn’t comment about the fact that his MSH had fallen to less than eight, a value so low it could not even be measured. Fisher had no protective reserve when the toxins attacked his innate immune response, as they surely would sometime.

“What will happen to Fisher if he goes back into the building?” she asked me.

“Carolyn, you’re better off moving,” I said. “Put him in a sc hool that you can prove is safe. It would be easier than trying to fight the board. We just don’t know what will happen to kids this young who take immune hits this profound.”

“They’ve given me their guarantee that everything will be fine … I have to take them at their word,” she said firmly. “Besides, I can’t just get up and move. I live in Hampton Bays—a half-acre lot with 3-bedrooms costs more than a million dollars! We can’t j ust leave our friends and family. No, they’ll have to fix the school.”

“And what about all the other sick kids,” she asked pointedly, “being pumped full of allergy medications and antibiotics all the time by their baby doctors. Believe me, I’ll never take him back to those pediatricians. Someone has to make a stand.”

We agreed on a plan. We had already done the repetitive exposure protocol twice. This time we wanted answers to a different series of questions. Could he return to school safely, with CSM? Without CSM?

Fisher would have his labs and VCS done now. I would record his symptoms: none. He would go back, without taking CSM, i nto his first grade classroom at Hampton Bays Elementary, located in an area away from the worst fungal growth. If he became ill, his new physician would record symptoms, perform a VCS test and measure his labs, especially MMP9 levels. Then he would stay in school, take a full dose of CSM, repeat the VCS, note symptoms and repeat the MMP9.

In other words, we would look at him away from school, off medication and compare him to being in school, off medication. If he responded badly and became ill, we would see what CSM did for him. If he recovered on CSM, with a return to normal VCS and MMP9, he would need to be medicated with CSM indefinitely to protect him from the school. Carolyn knew about some o f my patients who had successfully used CSM for preventing illness reacquisition despite re-exposure.

If Fisher did worse, however, with solid evidence of illness breaking through, despite CSM then Carolyn could ask them politely to find a safe alternative to the school for Fisher. Who cared if a board or a doctor had “guaranteed safety”? No one can do that. If the school didn’t volunteer help, including financial help, C arolyn’s attorney had some suggestions for alternative schooling.

It didn’t take long for Fisher to become sick. He had 10 health symptoms within three days. His MMP9 rocketed to 550 and his VCS score crashed.

He stayed in school, took CSM, with improvement in symptoms and VCS, but his MMP9 barely budged. The mold’s toxins were ferociously attacking him, hampering his immune delivery system, even through the shield of CSM. Was the school cleaned up? Not enough for Fisher. He was holding his own, but at a huge cost of ongoing immune activation. Would he end up with antibodies t o myelin basic protein and brain lesions from high MMP9 c aused by mold exposure? Who could wait long enough to find out?

Carolyn had no choice. Fisher had to leave.

Eva Williams was a new Mold Warrior. But she was a fast learner, and she knew her kids were exposed and in trouble.

Her two children, 8-year-old Stephanie, and Matthew age 5, were already sick. Stephanie had more symptoms than Matthew, but Matthew was beginning the downward spiral Eva had seen w ith Stephanie. The kids had unusual headaches, abdominal p ain, constant respiratory symptoms and moodiness and new onset learning problems—they just weren’t themselves. Eva noticed that whenever the kids had to go into Pat Romanosky’s old gymnasium, they got much worse, but the school’s new wing also made them ill.

She brought her family to Pocomoke for a standard evaluation. She was horrified to find that her children had the “dreaded” H LA DR genotypes, the ones that convey an extraordinarily increased risk of chronic, irreversible health changes following exposure to biotoxins.

Even worse, they both had extremely high levels of antibodies to gliadin, the real toxic agent for those who can’t tolerate gluten. G liadin is in so many foods since it’s often added to whey. Whey is a protein in cow’s milk (remember Little Miss Muffet eating her curds and whey?) and it’s added to an incredible number of commercial products. If you’re looking for gluten and whey in the grocery store to avoid them, good luck. Start with the obvious sources—bread, flour, milk products—but then add the unpredictable o nes: tomato sauce, fried onions, frozen hamburgers and cheese twists.

If you have antibodies to gliadin, each time you eat foods that contain gliadin, you’ll absorb the protein (that’s not the normal response), setting off a cytokine reaction (also not normal), making you sick. Gliadin antibodies will ruin your life!

Did that mean Eva’s kids could never have a sandwich or a piece of pizza again? Imagine being a child raised in 2004 without wheat (and add amylose starch, gluten and whey to the list).

As if the news for Eva wasn’t bad enough, MSH levels for both Matthew and Stephanie were incredibly low. But they were typical cases and they responded to CSM.

So with hope that any symptoms would be treatable, and after informing the school administration, she followed the 5-step repetitive exposure protocol. Her plan was to prove (or, hopefully for her kids, disprove) what she knew already: exposure to the school was destroying her children’s health.

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