The Flog – The Fabry Log

Hello All,

Let me ramble, as I often do. Monday we tested my office for mold spores. A dear listener actually sent the funds to do this testing and we are grateful. I wear a chemical splash suit every day I walk in there. I had thought that I was okay working in the office because there are
no common vents from the house.

As usual, I was wrong.

Evidently with me, the kids, Andrea, and our dogs coming in and out of the room, we brought in a significant number of spores. The culprit this time is penicillium aspergillius. About 650,000 spores per gram. There were 2.9 million spores in the room and pen asp should be no more than 1-2% of the spores. I'm not good at math, but 650K is more than 2%. Our dr. in AZ said, "Don't go in that room without scuba gear on." It's hard doing a show in scuba gear.

The good news is that the spores aren't stachybotrys. With pen asp, you can clean the electronics, hepa them, test them, and be pretty certain that the equipment is okay. But I don't know how long it will take to have someone clean them. And then I need to find a new place to broadcast.

My plan is to broadcast from Focus on the Family today and tomorrow. They have been such good friends over the years and they are opening their doors to the likes of me. I'm grateful. Then I'm hoping to drive to AZ with the other kids and get to Andrea near Tucson. Hey, it's our anniversary today!!! Yippee! What a world.

Andrea spent the night with Erin, our oldest, in the ER in Tucson. Something about her heart. Shannon stayed with the little kids at the hotel. All have tested positive for fungal growths after our massive exposure to toxins. It will take years to reverse this, and even then there may be permanent damage.

Merry Christmas from the Fabrys and I hope your year was just as good as ours. :)

I just sent an email to our mortgage company asking for relief and including test results, possible legal action, etc. I'm hoping for some relief from them.

Something really bad is going on here. This doesn't feel like the normal vicissitudes of life. And where bad things happen, God usually shows up, and we've seen that in a big way. I can't tell you, well I could, but I would just weep through the whole thing, of all the people, known and anonymous, who have helped out. Our church has been great. The teachers at school, those poor, penniless teachers raised $$ for us. Boy Scouts and neighbors. A guy at Focus gave me all of his old dress shirts, and they weren't that old. His wife said, "My husband has lost weight and we thought you could wear these." Dr. Gary Chapman has been unbelievably kind to us, and so have many others.

I now have more dress shirts than I've ever owned in my life but no house and no office.

The good news is that in the testing, we also had the house we're currently renting evaluated and it is fine, thank God. We thought we'd cross-contaminated, but that one is okay.

I'm fully expecting Satan to rise from the desert and try to smite us as we drive to Arizona. But greater is he who is in me than he who controls the mold. That's a rough paraphrase of the New Fabry International Version.

Thanks for your prayers. We are going to come out on the other side of this much stronger, I think. We realize how little control we have over any of this and are just taking small steps each day to keep going. This is going to be a Christmas to remember because I know we will never forget it. And I hope we never forget the kindness, the many people praying, and the wonderful friends we have who are going through this with us. I know we are not alone.
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