In November of 2020 Olivia was diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, but that was not where her health journey began. In 2016 she moved into her first apartment that unbeknownst to her, had black mold hiding in the crawlspace of the home. Olivia's health quickly started to decline, at first just feeling more tired than normal, then leading to infections I couldn’t not get over, then continuous antibiotics, then antibiotic resistance, then multiple surgeries, nothing was fixing the problem. My mom put it together that these issues only began after moving into the home. After having the home tested, we got a call on the weekend of July 4th in 2018, that we couldn’t spend one more night in the home, the levels we categorized as uninhabitable. At that moment, I didn’t know that news would change my life forever and put me on a mission to regain my health as well as fight for others in this situation.

I was told after getting out of that environment that I would see improvement, but I did not. An infectious disease doctor put me on a picc line for antibiotics, this didn’t fix the problem but did land me in the hospital with a blood clot in my arm. All of these unexplainable systems continued to occur though the doctors would tell me “your young and healthy”, everything looked good on paper. I was starting to feel hopeless that I would never regain my health until I came across the website called Survivingmold.com. As I continued to read more about CIRS, everything started to make sense. I could finally see that all of my symptoms were not random at all and in fact, I was not a hypochondriac!

Links:

Olivia Farabaugh on Instagram

/ oliviafarabaughofficial