There's so many angles and things at play here, and how I came to realise what's going on, so I'll just do my best to relate things in an order that makes conversational sense.

Somewhere around the start of the year I had a bout of dizziness followed by a headache. It seemed like standard sinus pain and I just did rinses and steam treatments to try and abate the pain. My life is very busy and I just pushed through this, after all it could not be serious. Meanwhile my mental cohesion started to degrade. By mid February I know I have an issue with these headaches, it's getting worse. I'm supposed to be starting a new degree but I can't even do my current technical job let alone learn a pile of new technical stuff.

I go to see doctor after doctor, no one can help. Pills that don't work or just make my state of mind deteriorate even further.

I live in the tropics and by now it's the middle of the wet season and it's absolutely pouring rain. I start missing work and just lay on the couch at home writhing in pain. It's like having a massive weight applied to my forehead and being struck by lightning constantly on the top of my head. No analgesic or opioid makes any difference to the pain at all. CNS depressants give very little, but some relief.

I see more doctors and finally I have a CT and MRI done on my head. The result... nothing. Nothing at all. I don't have a tumour, or cancer, or embolism, or bacterial infection, or anything. Nothing to see here. Now the doctors don't even want to talk to me anymore because I don't respond to any of their drugs and none of their scans show anything. Whatever is causing my pain is in the "too hard" basket for them.

I'm laying in bed last week thinking about what's going on. I'd become concerned that I may actually die from this and never know what killed me. So I start researching what causes sinus pain, headaches, dizziness and poor mental faculty but is none of these diseases I don't have. Top of the list is mold. I'm not even a doctor or a detective but this wasn't hard to figure out when I googled it. I live in a very wet area and it's the wet season.

Meanwhile, in the last year or two I have passed that glorious mid stage in life where a person's eyes start to become less accommodating and they usually go and get glasses. Because my job only requires that I see up close and I rarely drive anywhere it hasn't bothered me that I've become near sighted.

I get up from the computer and start looking around my house, closely at the walls, doors, curtains, ceilings. I am living in a mold colony! The thing that is killing me is all around me. It's not an illusion the more time I take off work the worse it gets, I'm literally being killed by my own home. There was 2x3m mold colonies on some walls and others were completely covered with it. Every door, curtain, blind, piece of furniture and the ceiling were infested with mold, somehow I just didn't see it. At that moment it all made sense. I wasn't sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.

The next day I bought a respirator and started the cleanup. Spraying everything with vinegar, wiping it down, letting it dry, spraying it down with clove oil and wiping it down again. My house is big though and after 2 days in my messed up state I didn't complete it, only the worst parts. I am considering throwing away all my curtains and blinds. I haven't even started working on the ceilings. How large this job is for me in my current condition can not be understated.

Even after the first day where I cleaned my bedroom and the hallway leading to it things started improving slightly. The headache lightning stopped and just reduced to pressure. All the other rooms along the hall are closed, I haven't made it to them yet. There's just so much to do, I have to deal with it one piece at a time.

I started taking carbon and milk thistle among other things to help clear out the toxins 5 days ago. My faculty is improving. Last week I struggled to recall the command to call up a text editor but this week I'm able to face more complex tasks again. I'm still not able to program competently again yet, I hope that will return to me soon enough, it's really rough going for my employers as well as I can't do the job I'm employed to do. Fortunately I've been there almost 10 years so there's plenty of good will and they are working through this with me.

I always thought this sort of thing was nonsense, stuff that happened to other people, unlikely and improbable. But now I understand that given just the right circumstances it can happen to anyone, including me.

Wow, that is a harrowing tale, glad to hear it seems close to over with! Mold can be quite insidious, luckily the worst its done to me is ruin some mushroom substrate or bread, not hamper my mind for months.

Are you considering changing residences due to this or are you confident in your mitigation strategy? A dehumidifier / air filter unit for your bedroom would probably do wonders

whoa man get out of there NOW! do you own your home? If so you should be contacting a specialist and if you do not own your home you should be contacting your property owner and possibly a lawyer. If you are able to see mold on walls then it is everywhere. I am not joking. Once it has infiltrated your HVAC system the spores will have spread to every single room in your house and is definitely growing inside of walls as well. My wife and I had to move homes for the same reason 5 years ago. GOod luck man. I hope your health is okay.

It's been a wild journey. The worst part about it was not knowing what the hell is going on. Wondering seriously if you're going to die soon is a tempering experience. I've become much less tolerant of many things that I would accept before, I'm still struggling with tact and there have been personality changes. Sometimes I'm not sure what is me and what is illness derived. It's challenging.

If I didn't own my own house I would be moving for sure. I've had some great advice in the last few days on ways to clean this stuff off my ceilings and furnishings. Yesterday I started on my blinds and windows. I will probably just throw out my curtains and buy machine washable ones. On the bright side it is the last month of the wet season and I should start seeing extended dry spells and crisp days and breezes soon.

It passed my mind at the time but I regret not taking photos of the worst of it.