by JASON WHITED
Wendy Pauluk’s morning medical marathon would choke the most hardened pill popper. She takes no morning coffee, no hearty breakfast to fortify her thin frame. She ignores morning newspapers or television weather reports for a gist on how her day will go. Even at this early, groggy hour, she knows she’ll be dead if she doesn’t take today’s nearly 90 different pills, inhalers and medical supplements already waiting for her when her feet hit the floor. By now, this regimen is old news.
The 47-year-old local psychologist says her piles of meds are the only reasons she’s still alive. They might keep her weakened body moving, but they also bolster her broken heart, shattered to bits since she lost her husband, Dan, to a toxic mold infection last July.
“Each morning, I immediately have to take five capsules to keep my immune system going. Thirty minutes later, it’s 16 more pills, followed by more pills for my kidneys, some anti-fungal medicine … and then, of course, what I have to take all through the day,” she says. Wendy doesn’t take the pills to cope with the pain of Dan’s loss. This isn’t Valium, or a Bloody Mary, just to get her through to lunchtime. This is life and death.
Since CityLife first reported in April that Wendy is suing the Health District of Southern Nevada, alleging Dan died from years of exposure to toxic mold while working at the district’s Shadow Land headquarters, doctors have found near-lethal levels of the same two mold species — Aspergillus and Stachybotrys — in Wendy’s body, too.
Unlike Dan — whose mold-related symptoms meant nearly four years of dementia, putrid, weeping sores that covered his body and internal organs eaten nearly through by the billions of mold spores coursing through his body, Wendy’s infection manifests only internally.
Since April, doctors have had to remove large parts of Wendy’s jaw and most of her teeth as the Aspergillus and Stachybotrys feasted on the bone and the soft tissues of her mouth and gums. Today, a weakness in her chest, a routinely swollen heart and bleeding lungs also round out her symptoms. Oh, and don’t forget the strokes. (She’s had at least three in the past couple of months). The dark mold spots that recently showed up in her cheeks worry Wendy, too. Doctors still want to know if the high levels of mold toxicity in her blood and brain caused them.
Beyond dispute, however, are the near-lethal levels of toxic mold that have infested her former family home and forced her into a rental house. National mold experts say it’s a wonder Wendy has survived this long after contracting the same mold that killed her husband. Based on two recent environmental studies of the suburban Henderson home she shared with Dan, the interior mold levels in Wendy’s house should have hospitalized her months ago.
According to one April 7 environmental study of the Pauluks’ family home from Phoenix-based Air Pure Environmental Services, the amount of Aspergillus – one of the biological weapons-grade molds that killed Dan – now eating away at that Henderson house is at least 16 times greater than spores sampled from ambient, outside air. The highest levels? In Dan’s former bedroom, where he spent the last year of his life screaming in pain most nights as the Aspergillus colonies in his internal organs ate their way out through his flesh. It’s the same room he died in, surrounded by Wendy and other family members.
Pauluk’s friends wonder how much more the woman can take. But new evidence in the case is raising fresh concerns both about how the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration handled the mold investigation at the health district and local politicians who claim to make public safety a top priority.
As CityLife reported in April, at least six environmental studies showed mold infestations at district’s headquarters as early as October 1998, when UNLV scientists first reported its presence there. Health district spokeswoman Stephanie Bethel cites a series of other reports, commissioned by the district, which show those two types of mold in the Shadow Lane building, but at or near similar levels to what inspectors found in the outside, ambient air. But other independent studies showed mold inside the district headquarters at near-toxic levels. After so many separate positive results, mold experts have asked why Nevada OSHA officials didn’t shut down the district headquarters for a full decontamination.
But Ron Parker, a local Nevada OSHA supervisor, said his inspectors did everything by the book. “We’re following federal standards; there are no mold [concentration] regulations,” he says.
Technically, Parker is correct, says Linda May, a nationally known toxic mold expert who’s working with the Department of Defense to help rid all stateside bases of similar toxic mold infestations. But overarching OSHA standards, specifically, section 5(a) of the agency’s federal regulations, require OSHA to shut down any office where toxic mold is suspected of sickening employees, says May. Those same federal regs would override the state statutes Parker reels off and suggests that perhaps he and his team could have done more to protect Dan and the other health district employees who contracted toxic mold while working at the Shadow Lane building. According to internal district memos obtained by CityLife, more than a dozen other employees could have been sickened by the mold.
“This guy [Parker] doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” says May. “Frankly, I’d like to know what his background is … He should have known this the day he joined OSHA.”
Equally troubling to Wendy is Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman’s handing off a package of citizen complaints about mold at the health district to Mayor Pro-Tempore Gary Reese and Ward 5 Councilman Ricki Barlow back in April.
Barlow, who also sits on the health district board of directors, says he intends to put an end to the more than 10 years of mold infestation on Shadow Lane. “I have no other choice but to stop it,” says Barlow. “I sit on this board and am serving as a concerned citizen. If [health district leaders] withheld additional information, I have to address it at this time,” he says.
Reese, however, said one conversation with health district chief Dr. Larry Sands was enough to put his mind at ease. After Sands allegedly told Reese the mold problem had been “fixed,” the councilman says he was satisfied. “I just go by what they tell me,” says Reese. For months, CityLife has asked to speak with Sands, but reporters are always handed off to his public relations staffers.
In addition to the comments from local politicians on the matter, a series of internal health district memos and e-mails show supervisors there allowed at least one other health district employee, Lyle Rohan, to transfer out of the Shadow Lane offices in 2003 after he complained of breathing problems because of mold in the building. Dan Pauluk wasn’t transferred until after two years of similar requests — in 2005, when he was already dying of mold poisoning.
“Why was his request honored and mine denied?” asks Dan in an internal memo. Wendy is still waiting for an answer to that one.
And she and her attorney, Alex Ghibaudo, would also like to know how district lawyers could be so callous in their motions to have the case thrown out. In a matter of weeks, a judge will decide whether to dismiss Pauluks’ suit or proceed with oral arguments. In the meantime, a motion filed by health district lawyers seems to mock the Pauluks’ ordeal, when it reads, ” … a certain toughening of the mental hide is better protection than a law could ever be.”
“What?” asks an incredulous Ghibaudo. “It would be a frightening society which harbored the kind of people that could watch others die under such horrible circumstances and not care an iota about it. Nevertheless, this is the callous indifference that is typical of [the health district], its supervisors, managers and its lawyers.”
Spokesmen for both the health district and OSHA have refused to comment further on the case.
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