Suzanne Somers is a cancer survivor. She was diagnosed with cancer back in 2001, and she beat it. But Suzanne Somers got the depressing news that her cancer had returned, in fact that she was in worse shape than ever before.

But it turned out to all be wrong, and the culprit was something that many people have in their homes.

“I ended up in the hospital for six days with a misdiagnosis of cancer,” Suzanne Somers who is kicking high at age 68, told ET. “When they read the CAT scan they said, ‘You have cancer everywhere. You have a mass on your lung and it’s covering your whole liver, and you have so many masses in your chest we can’t count them, and they’re all tumors, and you have a blood clot, and you have pneumonia.'”

But it turned out to not be cancer at all. Instead, Suzanne Somers found out she had black mold infestation in the house she and her husband were leasing.

“When we went down to that room it was like ‘Little Shop of Horrors,'” Suzanne Somers said. “This leased house that we were living in — there was an unfinished room downstairs where there was standing water and black mold. It was crawling up through the dry wall, like worms almost, into the air conditioning and heating ducts, and we were breathing it in for the four years. I got the fungus in my lung which can kill you.”

One testing company says of the kind of mold infestation that Suzanne Somers had:

“Mold growth can spread inside walls, under cabinets and floors, above ceilings, and deep into heating and air conditioning vents as long as the right conditions exist. By the time hidden mold is detected, it can cause tens of thousands of dollars in property damage and pose significant health risks.”

Suzanne Somers could see the mold in her home, but that is actually unusual. Mold like that may not even be discernible to the naked eye, especially since it can be hidden within the structure of a home. But it is airborne, and therefore requires an air test. These tests are more expensive than the store-bought swab tests, but much more thorough. Some people use the results of such tests to negotiate out of a lease in a mold-ridden home because the results are lab-certified paired with reports from a certified testing company.

After her scare, Suzanne Somers wrote the book Tox-Sick: From Toxic to Not Sick, which talks about her own remedies for cleansing her body after her mold exposure.