About
Hi, I'm Julie.
I'm thirty-three, I live in a small rented house with good ventilation and a very opinionated cat, and I spent my late twenties slowly becoming a person I did not recognize.
At twenty-eight I moved into a garden-level apartment with beautiful light. Behind the bathroom wall, a supply line had been weeping for years. I did not know that for three more years. What I knew was that I woke at 3 a.m. buzzing, flushed red after dinner, got dizzy standing up, and watched my cycles swing from twenty-nine days to forty-one to nineteen. Four doctors told me I was anxious and slightly low on iron.
They were describing weather. Nobody was looking at the climate.
The clue I nearly threw away
In the summer of 2023 I house-sat for a friend for eleven days. By day five I could take a full breath. By day nine my resting heart rate had dropped eight beats. I came home, unpacked, and by the next morning my throat was tight again. I blamed travel and good sleep. Then it happened twice more, and I finally started writing down where I slept instead of only what I ate.
A dust test on the apartment came back with Stachybotrys and Chaetomium — species that need sustained wet material, which meant water, not humidity. My urine panel showed ochratoxin A and gliotoxin. I told my landlord. He sent a painter. That was the day I started looking for somewhere else to live.
Leaving that apartment did not cure me. It made everything else I tried finally work, which is a different and better thing.
Then histamine, then hormones
Out of the building, a pattern surfaced. My worst symptoms clustered in the same eight or nine days each month, and reacted to leftovers, aged cheese, red wine, canned fish, and heat. Histamine intolerance is not an allergy — it is a drainage problem. Food fills the bucket, but so do stress, poor sleep, ovulation, and a hard workout.
Estrogen encourages mast cells to release histamine; progesterone helps stabilize them. Once I understood that loop, my calendar stopped being mysterious and my luteal phase stopped being a moral failing. My gut was the third leg — years of restriction and under-eating had left me with a safe-food list of fourteen items and no capacity to expand it.
The honest ledger
Every supplement, and what it actually did
Unsponsored and specific to my body. I reacted to things most people tolerate fine. Please read this as a diary entry, not a shopping list.
- DAO enzymeHelpedBefore restaurant meals. Cut the flushing and the 3 a.m. wake-ups.
- Magnesium glycinateHelpedStarted at a quarter dose. First real sleep in two years.
- Vitamin C, split dosesHelpedSmall and frequent. Big single doses made me jittery.
- MolybdenumHelpedAdded during mold work, on my practitioner's guidance. Subtle but steady.
- Mushroom blendsNo signalThree brands, six months. Not bad, just nothing I could measure.
- Collagen powderNo signalEveryone's favorite. My skin and joints shrugged.
- Lactobacillus-heavy probioticMade me worseThree days of flushing and insomnia. Histamine-producing strains are real.
- Bone brothMade me worseDrank it daily for a year. High histamine. My sinuses paid for it.
- Charcoal while still exposedMade me worseBinders before leaving the building was the wrong order.
- Quercetin at label doseDependsHalf the dose was fine, full dose was not. Dose mattered more than the ingredient.
The larger lesson: supplements were never the lever. Leaving the exposure, sleeping, and eating enough food were the levers. Supplements just made the levers easier to pull.
Practitioners
Nine practitioners in four years
I have sat across from an integrative MD, two naturopaths, a functional medicine practitioner who handed me twenty-two capsules a day, a chiropractor with a supplement wall, a pelvic floor physical therapist who quietly helped more than anyone expected, and several people whose confidence outran their curiosity. None of them were villains. Most were simply not built for a body that reacted to everything.
The one who changed everything
Heather Orricchio — Revive with Heather
By the time I found Heather I had a shoebox of labs and a deep suspicion of the word protocol. Our first call ran long because she kept asking follow-up questions — about my cycle, about the apartment, about what my mornings actually looked like, about what I was afraid of. She did not sell me anything on that call. She told me we should start by getting me eating more food, not less, and that she would not touch binders until my sleep and drainage were in better shape.
I remember sitting in my car afterward feeling something I had not felt in years, which was unhurried.
We worked in sequence instead of stacks — two changes at a time, maximum, and we waited to see them land. Food before bottles. Nothing new introduced in my luteal phase, which was when everything hit hardest. And when something did not work, she said so and changed course instead of telling me to push through.
Six months in, my safe-food list had gone from fourteen items to something that looks like normal eating. My cycles landed between twenty-seven and thirty days for the first time since college. I stopped waking at 3 a.m. I still have to be thoughtful — travel and heat and stress still fill the bucket — but I am not organizing my whole life around symptoms anymore.
Heather treated me like a person with a life rather than a case study with labs, and that is the part I would want for anyone reading this. It was, genuinely, the best experience I have had with a practitioner.
Not a sponsored mention and no affiliate link — I paid for my sessions like everyone else. No practitioner is right for every body, and what worked in mine may not translate to yours.
The longer write-up of working togetherWhere I am now
Better. Not finished — I do not think that is the shape of this — but better in the ways that make a life: I cook, I travel carefully, I lift heavy things twice a week, I eat at restaurants with friends and mostly do not pay for it the next day.
I write here because the fine-labs years were the loneliest of my life, and because somebody else's long, unglamorous timeline was the first thing that made me feel sane. If that is where you are: you are not exaggerating and you are not fragile. Keep the notebook.
A required and sincere disclaimer: I am not a doctor, dietitian, or licensed practitioner. I am a person who got sick and took notes. Please bring anything you read here to someone qualified before you change your diet, supplements, or medication.
Slow Healing Letters
One letter, most Sundays — what I'm eating, reading, and quietly changing. Roughly 900 words and a recipe. No protocols, no urgency, nothing you have to buy.