About me

Hi, I’m Caroline.

My story doesn’t have a cute opening scene or a perfect wellness montage. It starts with a lot of questions, a lot of confusion and a desperate need to feel better. If you’re wondering what the inspiration behind this website is, here’s a quick story for you:

Once upon a time I was a very high energy, adventurous, aspiring entrepreneur, pursuing the balance of exploring the world and building a career for myself, and having a great time of it.

Pics below to prove it.

Then in 2020, I got sick with COVID-19 like most everyone else, and for me that was the beginning of a long chain of autoimmune disasters that included mold illness, CIRS, POTS, and Lyme disease. I was experiencing incapacitating symptoms which forced me out of the gig economy one client at a time. First I couldn’t meet the physical demands of running my small business, Optimum Organizing, until I eventually lost it, and then suddenly my brain wasn’t even working well enough to keep up with my graphic design work load and I dropped my contacts one by one as I lost my capacity to perform. I went from working 80 hour weeks and loving every moment of building an exciting adventurous life for myself, to being unable to get out of bed for days at a time. This forced me to stop and completely rethink everything I thought I knew about health, food, and what words like “good for you” or “toxins” even mean.

In the middle of all that chaos, I started studying. I experimented with fasting as I was looking for anything that might help me feel better, and most of all bring my brain back. I had been let down by doctor after doctor and was ready to start finding my own answers. What I found was tangible therapeutic relief from ketosis. That was the first big “wait, what?” moment. It made me question everything I thought I knew about the modern diet, so-called “good food,” and even the idea of “healthy cooking.” Cooking culture runs deep in my Italian/cajun family, so food was something I was already pretty fascinated with. What is it that makes food really good? And what makes us crave it? These were questions I was already so curious about. I had always been told that when you’re sick, you should eat easy, ‘comforting carbs’ and follow the standard “bland diet” advice, but my body was telling me something different. The more I read, the more I realized that a lot of those recommendations are built around faulty advice coming from big food corporations, encouraging high-carb, ultra processed foods that can actually drive inflammation instead of calming it.

That connection hit hard when I realized the correlation with what I was experiencing while having COVID. A cytokine storm is when your immune system releases a flood of inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines in response to an insult, and as we now now, years later, in some people that response becomes excessive and uncontrolled, which can drive severe inflammation and make people feel extremely sick. Knowing how large a roll histamines and inflammation seem to play in how we feel, made me wonder how much of the “normal” diet people rely on when they’re sick might actually be adding fuel to that inflammatory fire. If my body was already primed for an overactive immune response, it made sense that the foods I was being told to lean on could be making things worse instead of better.

After that initial cytokine storm brought on by the virus, even though I had cleared the virus, I remained super sensitive to anything that triggered a histamine response, which required me to do more than just control my diet. I started paying attention not just to what I ate, but to how different places, smells and other substances made me feel hours and even days later. That shift forced me to look at my whole environment through a new lens, questioning not only the food on my plate but also the products in my home, the air I was breathing, and the everyday exposures I had never really thought about before. It was this search for an environmental insult that lead me to discover I was living in a mold infested apartment, which lead to me losing my home as well as most of my belongings.

In 2021 I was finally diagnosed with mold toxicity and began working with a functional health practitioner and following the Shoemaker protocol. Finding a living environment with a low enough mold count for my healing proved impossible. So I came up with the idea of purchasing a small space that I could control. After some research, I found the Coachman Ultra-lite Camper, a travel trailer made with environmental toxins in mind! If you want to learn more about that read HERE.

My case of CIRS was particularly stubborn and stumping my practitioner, so we consulted with Dr Heyman, the lead CIRS Practitioner in the country. Along the way, I continued studying on my own and working hard to understand what my body was telling me.

So that is how my health journey became so much bigger than just food. I had to rebuild from scratch and I knew I had to do it very intentionally. As I replaced my belongings I eliminated sources of toxins from everyday use items, because I realized now that what I was putting on my skin, cleaning with, and even breathing in mattered just as much as what I was eating. I learned to pay attention to details most people never even think about, like WHO made the products in my home, the materials I surround myself with, and WHAT exactly is in them. The changes I’ve made have been slow, sometimes frustrating, but one thing is clear: they’ve been worth it. Every step has taught me something new, and every small win has reminded me that healing is possible, even when it feels out of reach for the moment.

I have been blessed with the support of a big, loud, loving family, and after several years of educating myself and brining my family along for the ride as we work towards a healthier lifestyle, I’ve witnessed the benefit of this information for anyone, not just the chronically ill.

That’s why I’m starting this website now. Since I am the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’, I want to share the hard-earned knowledge of what has and has not worked for me, so that others can benefit. If my experience can help anyone else make sense of their symptoms, rethink their environment, or feel less alone in their own healing process, then that makes all this effort a little more worth while. My hope is to create a place where practical wisdom, honest experience, and healthier living come together in a way that feels real, relatable, and actually helpful. No perfect vibes, no pretend wellness — just real talk and real tools for people who are ready to take their health back into their own hands.