Judge Shay Gebhardt's Battle for her life

[Guest guest]

(of all the articles I've read about exposure to toxic molds - this one

comes closest to detailing what happened to me. sorry i missed it when it

came out)

http://www.mysanantonio.com/expressnews/

Express-News by Yerkes

Yerkes: The fungus among us: a real threat

San Express-News

Web Posted : 02/16/2001

Judge Shay Gebhardt knew she was dying. She just didn't know why. And

neither did the doctors.

For more than a year, Gebhardt, a Bexar County Court-at-Law judge, had been

steadily going downhill. It started with a racking cough, and it got worse.

She lost the zip that had propelled her through motherhood, nursing school

and 13 years as an RN, then law school, and then a bitter battle to unseat

an incumbent county judge. Suddenly, she could barely drag through a day.

" I thought it was flu. But I couldn't shake it, " she recalls.

Her doctors told her it was flu, then walking pneumonia.

" The fatigue was overwhelming. I'd get off work, drive home and go straight

to bed every day. I was falling asleep talking to people. On the weekends, I

would literally sleep around the clock.

" By then I had taken every antibiotic, every cough syrup and prescription on

the market. I began to have this overwhelming sense that I was dying. "

Frightened, she asked a psychiatrist friend, Dr. King, to test her for

severe depression. Instead, he sent her to his allergist.

" She was in bad shape, " recalls that allergist, Dr. s.

" Very haggard, so tired she wasn't functioning very well, short of breath,

coughing. Dr. King is a patient of mine, and he thought it might be

allergy. "

But it was not allergy.

After a series of tests, s dropped a bombshell on Gebhardt.

" Dr. s told me I might have only weeks to live, if he was correct, "

Gebhardt recalls.

s recognized Gebhardt's symptoms as those he'd found repeatedly in

patients whose homes or offices had high concentrations of certain molds and

bacteria. Hers was one of the more severe cases, he said. When she told him

her home had flooded the year before, he forbade her to re-enter it, and

prescribed high doses of steroids to reduce the inflammation in her lungs.

It took months in a motel room while the house was completely cleaned of

contaminants before she returned. County renovations freed her courtroom of

musty basement air she thinks helped set her up for sickness. Today, she is

healthy again, although after a divorce and selling that home she went

through five rental residences before she could find a home that she felt

safe in; " the most well-tested house in Alamo Heights, " she says, laughing.

Her daughter and her then-husband were never affected, which fits

s' theory that high concentrations and genetic predisposition make

certain microbes fatal to certain patients. " They're common substances. But

when you're in an enclosed space, breathing them daily, some individuals are

affected severely, " he says.

Working with pulmonologist Dr. s and Jackie Coalson, a

pulmonary pathologist at UTHSC, s has come to new conclusions about

environmentally related illness; conclusions he believes will shock many

physicians when the trio presents its ideas on environmentally triggered

disease.

When they do, a grateful Gebhardt will be there to back them up.