The apartment that made me sick (and the four years it took to figure it out)

I moved into that garden-level apartment at twenty-eight because it had the good light and a bathtub, and I stayed for three years because rent in that neighborhood was a small miracle. I did not know that behind the tiled wall in the bathroom, a supply line had been weeping for years.

What I noticed first was not mold. It was sound sensitivity. Then a heart rate that spiked when I stood up. Then flushing after dinner, waking at 3 a.m. wide awake and buzzing, cycles that went from twenty-nine days to forty-one to nineteen. Four separate doctors told me I was anxious and low on iron, and they were not entirely wrong — they were just describing weather instead of climate.

The clue I almost threw away

In the summer of 2023, I house-sat for a friend for eleven days. By day five, I could take a full breath. By day nine, my resting heart rate had dropped eight beats. I came home, unpacked, and by the next morning my throat was tight again. I wrote it off as travel and good sleep. Then it happened twice more.

Pay attention to buildings, not just days. If you feel dramatically different somewhere else, that is data, not coincidence.

What testing actually told me

I ran an ERMI dust test on the apartment and a urine mycotoxin panel on myself. The dust test came back with elevated Stachybotrys and Chaetomium — two species that need sustained wet material to grow, which meant water, not humidity. My urine panel showed ochratoxin A and gliotoxin. Neither test is perfect, and plenty of thoughtful practitioners argue about how to interpret them. But together with the house-sitting experiment, the picture stopped being ambiguous.

I told my landlord. He sent a painter. That was the day I started looking for somewhere else to live, which was its own long, expensive, grief-shaped project that I wrote about separately.

What I would do differently

• Trust the location pattern earlier. Track symptoms alongside where you slept, not only what you ate.
• Look for water history before buying an air purifier. Remediation is the intervention; filtration is support.
• Do not start aggressive binders while still living in the exposure. I did, and I felt worse for months.
• Photograph and date everything if you rent. I wish I had.

Leaving that apartment did not cure me. It made everything else I tried finally work, which is a different and better thing.