Help Will Recover from Toxic Mold Illness

My name is Will Connolly, I am 23 years old, and I have been experiencing debilitating, progressive, and bizarre health issues for years. Last fall, none of the 10+ medical professionals I’d seen had made a dent and the next proposed solution was a $65k jaw replacement surgery, which had no guarantee of working to solve my jaw pain, let alone my dozen other non-jaw related symptoms. So I took a leap of faith on an equally bizarre solution called extreme mold avoidance.

As a result I have made an almost miraculous but very tenuous recovery, and maintaining it has required living in the desert in my car (which is on its last legs) and landed me in a really precarious financial situation. I'm at a point where I can't continue without help.

My health and ‘housing’ stability are bound up in this really hairy way. I have gained back a degree of functionality that I previously couldn’t have imagined, but I am spending most of it living this way so that I can keep it. I am frequently displaced due to BLM and campground stay limits, wildfire smoke, and moldy RVs. Every time something goes awry and I become sick, it requires camping in extremely remote places, doing without many things most people consider basic necessities and away from anyone who could help me. As you can imagine this is a really rigorous way of life and isn’t particularly compatible with being gainfully employed.

In addition, I took a year longer to graduate due to my health, had to break my lease, and lost everything I owned–my car, my furniture, my clothes, my books. Unlike people who lose their possessions to floods or fires, I received no help from insurance.

My car is from 2003 and has almost 200k miles on it. And for the reasons described I have very little money. I am asking for $10,00 for replacing my car and for living expenses through the winter. If you’d like to contribute without fees my Venmo is Will-Connolly-24. Thank you, and if you want to hear more of the story read below.

The protocol is called mold avoidance, extreme mold avoidance, or biotoxin avoidance. When I discovered it last August I was skeptical but intrigued. It was pioneered by a man named Erik Johnson who went from being bed-bound to climbing Mt. Whitney in 6 months. I read about all these people getting rid of everything they owned and fleeing to the wilderness, all of their mysterious afflictions dropping away. The difference these people were describing was staggering, so, I thought, I’d know if it was working. Having my jaw joints completely replaced with metal seemed far riskier and more expensive than a camping trip.

I didn’t have the sort of symptoms I had thought were associated with mold. I never thought to attribute my jaw degeneration, my fatigue, my insomnia, myoclonic jerks, or any of the other symptoms in nearly every system in my body to my environment. No doctor could connect them to anything either; every diagnosis I received began with a word like “idiopathic” or “undifferentiated.” But it made sense when I thought about my college houses–the musty smell, the floor that caved in, the times I’d scrub green or black mold from the walls, the cabinets, not knowing any better. I thought about the subtle improvements I’d experienced sleeping elsewhere.

On October 21st, 2022, on the 12th day of a fever, I fled to the desert, taking nothing from my moldy house, and immediately experienced healing beyond what I thought was possible. In the past 9 months, I’ve gone from regularly experiencing jaw pain so severe it prevented me from eating, sleeping, speaking, or thinking to experiencing none at all. I went from being so weak and fatigued I couldn’t walk up 2 flights of stairs to going on runs at 6800 ft. I went from taking a leave of absence from college, afraid I’d never work or go to school again, to being able to finish my degree in the desert on my iPhone 13 mini.

I feel healthier than I have since childhood. Most people know the feeling of a fever finally lifting after a long and bad flu, how good it is to feel life returning to you. When you get so sick so gradually, like a frog in a pot, you don’t even realize how bad it is until it’s suddenly gone. At the beginning, a basic level of functionality and health felt so euphoric it was like someone had taken that feeling and made it into a recreational drug.

Throughout this undertaking I have closely followed a patient community who have reached remission from severe chronic illness by scrupulously identifying and avoiding mold and other environmental toxins. The idea is that after years of exposure to particularly problematic mold toxins, people become sensitive to certain kinds of toxicity, even in amounts that most healthy people would never notice. But after time away from the toxins that drive illness, the body is able to heal, regains the ability to process them like most people are, and there are fewer restrictions on where a person can be. At present, I have a sort of “budget” of time I can spend in moldy buildings or polluted city air, and it’s growing all the time. This isn’t a quick fix, but many people who have followed this protocol have been able to resume pretty normal lives.

I understand that this is strange. I am not sure I would believe this if it weren’t happening to me. I won’t pretend to be more certain or scientific than I am. I will say that when I become frustrated with the limitations of this way of living, and try to bend the rules, I always suffer for it. I think if this sort of illness were responsive to placebos, that would have helped me while I was pursuing legitimate medical interventions that I trusted to work, not while I was miles from home, playing Into the Wild, full of doubts and fears.

I’ve waited a while to make this request, in part because I hesitate to share so much about my life so publicly, in part for fear of seeming insane. I don’t think it’s easy for anyone, but it does feel fitting to have to ask for help on an endeavor that has shown me over and over how connected I am to the life around me, that healing is relational, not a triumph over something. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of the people who have helped me already. Thank you all, sincerely. With your continued help I have a chance at healing in a more permanent way.