Give Jeannette a Safe Home to Heal in

If you've made your way to this page, maybe you've been following our story as we have gone through a painful decade.

Our Situation:

Jeannette was born and raised around a train station in Livingston, MT that was later found to be extremely toxic from industrial waste. She spent her childhood going to doctors to fix dietary issues and other random symptoms. But, since her first pregnancy 12 years ago, her symptoms have increased severely. Insomnia, passing out, low blood pressure, constant pain. Her last pregnancy was so bad, I got a vasectomy to hopefully save her life. Doctors and Naturopaths had no answers, but said she looked healthy and had no real problems. After the last pregnancy, she kept getting worse and was not recovering. The stress of trying to take care of 4 young children while barely being able to stand, endure constant pain, and insomnia was enough to take us out as a family.

In 2019, Jeannette and our two youngest were formally diagnosed with CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome), which is a fancy way of saying that the body does not properly expel toxic substances but builds inflammation instead.

When Jeannette has the strength to go out, she always puts on a smile, so most people are unaware of how bad her condition really is. These years she is often unable to walk. On multiple occasions, she has slept for 3 days at a time without waking up. When she has a flare up (usually from briefly walking into a building that has had water damage or old substances), she loses cognitive function, slurs her words, and can't find the right words to speak. She deals with constant fatigue, passing out, nausea, pain throughout her muscles and joints, random excruciating ice-pick pains throughout her whole body, frequent splitting migraines, constant sinus infections and severe weakness throughout her body - among many other things. All of this has taken a huge toll on her social life (if you know her, she is VERY social and loves to care for others). It's hard to make friends when you can't think or talk properly, or even go into the places everyone goes.

We are currently living in a home that Jeannette is very sensitive to. She is living in the backyard in a lonely tent to reduce her exposure as much as possible. She’s extremely sick and barely able to walk from the few minutes she's spending in the house each day. When we signed this lease, we hoped things would be different, but with our children diagnosed with the same illness, building up toxicity in their bodies as well, we are finding that living in a traditional house isn't an option anymore. We are breaking our lease and leaving on November 17th. After this date, we have nowhere to go. Because we have to find a home that isn’t prone to mold (no drywall, and no wood), we are forced to either camp in a tent perpetually or move into an aluminum trailer.

The Impact:

Financially, during the first year of the diagnosis we went $30,000 into credit card debt during this time paying for medical tests and IV treatments to help keep the symptoms at bay. Since then we have done zero treatments, as we haven’t had the money to do so. We’ve spent thousands on Mold Tests on every potential home we’ve considered moving into, and it took 3 years to find a clean home (that we no longer live in). When we threw away all of our things (a normal approach to avoiding mold exposure), we had to re-buy new beds for the kids, and slowly build up new furniture to have some sense of normalcy, which put off treatments even more.

The Impact on our kids is obviously the hardest part for us as a family. Jeannette has missed out on most of their childhood. I have carried as much weight as I could bear as their father, but I’ve failed at making sure each of them is given the childhood they deserve. We’ve never taken a vacation, but we’ve taken emergency trips to Montana for family support. We’ve missed their birthdays multiple years when Jeannette was in bed for months at a time. Recently, we’ve had to pull the kids out of school away from their friends just to stay afloat. They are handling it so much better than I could have imagined, but it’s devastating to cause them so much chaos, instability, and unreliability in their lives.

(I gave the kids some giant magic leaves I found while hiking Castle Crags to pray for mommy with. She had been in bed for days at this point.)

The impact on our marriage has been the equally as heart wrenching for us. Illness has taken a major toll on our connection. While living with this intense stress it is difficult not to blame each other for all the dropped balls, lack of reliability, lack of funds, lack of fun, etc. We’ve been close to divorce for 3 years, but I can tell you that the worst is over. We are on the upswing as we’ve both learned to care for ourselves individually and to trust and lean on each other in the midst of absolute chaos.

(When she isn't well, she's either laying down or in the bath or sauna)

The Solution:

After a decade of searching for answers, many doctors and naturopaths, we’ve found that there is a two-pronged approach to healing this condition.

1) Avoiding Mold Exposure, and

2) Various Therapeutic treatments.

Avoiding mold Exposure comes in the form of abandoning traditional building practices and living in a place where mold isn’t likely to grow. Mold grows everywhere, so many people with this condition end up living in travel trailers that are constructed without permeable materials. Our goal is to buy and live in one of these trailers to have a sustainable clean environment to live in where we can travel to treatment centers to pursue healing.

Some of the options available to us for Treatment:

We are hoping to raise $200,000 to do the following:

Every dollar invested doesn’t just go towards a trailer and towards treatments, it goes towards Jeannette getting her life back, me getting my wife back, and my children getting their mom back.

If you’re not able to donate, please share our story on social media to maximize the reach of this fundraiser to help my kids get their mom back!

(here's a video of Jeannette running after being mold free for over a year)

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.