Yes, agree with the others, this is a classic case of a Fish-In Cycling Situation with Ft.Fisher not having had access to nitrogen cycle knowledge and information in the past.
Ft.fisher it sounds like you're on the right track to beginning to get up to speed. The Nitrogen Cycle article and the Fish-In cycling article in our Beginners Resouce Center will contain the most fundamental information underlying what everyone's saying to you and it can take anyone several readings of these to have them begin to sink in, so don't worry about reading them more than once.
For any tank in a fish-in cycling situation, a good liquid-reagent based test kit is essential. While it can help to try and get some numbers from a test at the local shop, there are just lots of problems with trying to depend on that. First of all, it really takes -daily-, even -twice daily- testing and writing down of the results so you can see them in a string of multi-day information before you can really understand what's going on in your tank, especially if you're a beginner. Secondly, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong with shop testing. The employee might not actually know how to perform the test correcty. They might not do it carefully. They might not want to share the real numbers with you because that could mean they would not get a fish sale. All sorts of weird things like that are possibilities -- not saying they would happen, just that we've seen all these in our cases over the years.
In a fish-in cycling situation where you don't yet have good testing going, you have no choice but to assume things -might- be worse than you think. This is why significantly large daily water changes (with good technique) are called for. It can really take 75% (or maybe 60% or 50%) daily water changes to keep things safe until you can get a good kit and really find out. Without further information its pretty urgent that this be done.
Ammonia and nitrite(NO2) can each, individually, be highly damaging and stressful to fish. Ammonia, even in tiny amounts, causes permanent gill damage that can lead to shortened fish lives or death. Nitrite is actually a bit worse, acting indirectly to suffocate the fish and give rapid symptoms of brain and nerve damage that is permanent. Other concerns about water parameters or water changes are rendered rather unimportant when we are dealing with quantities of ammonia and nitrite potentially being present.
So, "insurance" water changes with good technique(using conditioner to remove chlorine/chloramines and rough temperature matching via your hand) and acquiring a good test kit are definately the right direction for you to be heading!
~~waterdrop~~