CIRS, Mold Exposure & CBD

In 2023, Lauren Loewenstein was preparing to compete in bodybuilding when the left side of her body stopped keeping up with the right. It was not ordinary fatigue and it was not a training error she could program around. The left side simply would not lift what the right side lifted, and it did not come back.

Until that point her decline had been possible to rationalize. There had been symptoms, appointments and questions, but nothing that forced the issue. This forced it. Her doctors did what careful doctors do with a young, strong, previously healthy patient whose nervous system appears to be failing: they went looking for the serious neurological diseases first. Multiple sclerosis was considered. So was ALS.

Within a matter of months, a woman who had been training for a stage competition was spending most of her day in bed. The physical collapse was only part of it. Lauren also developed derealization — a state in which the world goes strange and far away, in which objects and people and time itself feel subtly wrong. There were moments when she looked at her own children and did not recognize them. Her mental health fell with her body, and at her lowest point, she says, she did not want to continue living.

What kept her upright was the fact that she could not afford to stop. Because her children were sick too. "Trying to show up to be a mom for sick kids was the only thing that kept me going."

The Last Place She Looked

The family had moved in during 2019, shortly before the pandemic. The house was about nine years old. Nothing about it looked wrong. They ate well, they trained, they paid closer attention to their health than most families do — and over the next few years nearly everyone under that roof got worse.

Her children developed persistent gastrointestinal problems. There were stretches of insomnia, high fevers, leg cramps, bed-wetting. Her oldest son began experiencing intrusive thoughts, depressive episodes and severe behavioral changes at an age when none of that should have been happening. All of it arrived alongside the ordinary, non-negotiable demands of parenting, which continued whether or not Lauren felt capable of meeting them.

For years she did not connect any of it to her home. In hindsight the coincidence is almost comically loud. At the time it was invisible, for the reason it is usually invisible: like most people facing chronic illness, she looked at the body. She went to the doctor. She weighed diagnoses. She tried to work out how someone strong enough to train as a bodybuilder had become someone who could not get out of bed. When a neurologist raised multiple sclerosis, she was not convinced. The explanation did not fit the shape of what was happening.

Mold had been mentioned to her before and she had waved it off. She assumed a serious mold problem would announce itself — a flood, visible damage, something unmistakable.

The Grout That Kept Going Dark

Then she noticed a patch of grout in the primary bathroom shower that kept darkening after she cleaned it. Not once. Repeatedly. It is a small thing, and small things are how these cases usually break. She started investigating and, according to Lauren, testing came back showing elevated mold in the house. The family also found that a plumbing trap in the laundry room had been dry for years, which meant sewer gas had been venting into their home for as long as they had lived in it.

The house had been the fixed point that family life organized itself around. It became something they were afraid to be inside - and they left. The exit was abrupt and financially brutal. They paid the mortgage on a house they could not occupy while also paying to live somewhere else. Then Lauren and her husband decided to part with roughly 90 percent of what they owned — furniture, household objects, most of what a family accumulates in the course of being a family.

She is more measured about that decision now. At the time she was operating on fear, without the physical or mental capacity to evaluate each thing on its merits. Knowing what she knows now, she believes a great deal of it could have been saved.

"I tell most of my clients that's actually not necessary. Now that I know what I know, a lot can be saved because we don't have to act on fear." That distinction — between acting on fear and acting on information — turns out to be the through-line of everything she does today.

What CIRS Is

Lauren came to understand her illness through the framework of Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, or CIRS: a multi-system illness associated with exposure to biotoxins, most often in water-damaged buildings.

The framework was developed by Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker and is used by a specific community of clinicians (www.cirsx.com) rather than being a settled, consensus diagnosis in conventional medicine — worth saying plainly, because it explains a good deal about why patients like Lauren spend years in the wrong offices. The proposition is that in most people the immune system tags biotoxins, clears them and moves on. In a genetically susceptible minority the adaptive response never properly forms, the biotoxins recirculate, and the innate immune system keeps firing at them indefinitely. Inflammation stops being an event and becomes a condition.

Shoemaker's estimate, drawn from his analysis of HLA gene registries, is that roughly 24% of the population carries a haplotype associated with that susceptibility. Whatever the precise figure proves to be, the clinical implication is the part that matters to families: two people can sleep in the same bedroom, breathe the same air and have entirely different outcomes. One of them cannot think straight. The other is fine, and is quietly wondering why their spouse has become so difficult.

Among the clinicians working in this area is Dr. Eric Dorninger, ND, LAc, who founded Roots & Branches Integrative Health Care in Louisville, Colorado in 2005 as a practice built around what he calls mystery illness. His route into biotoxin work is itself instructive. After the 2013 Boulder floods he observed that patients who had been steadily improving suddenly regressed, and that the patients he had struggled to diagnose in the first place got worse. The buildings had changed. The people in them changed with the buildings. That observation led him to Shoemaker's published work, and eventually to treating the illness he turned out to have himself.

The Relief of Being Told Something

For someone who had spent years accumulating symptoms and normal test results, a diagnosis produced an emotion that surprises people who have never been through it: relief.

There is a particular cruelty to unexplained illness. Not knowing does not make you less sick. It removes the reassurance that anyone understands why you are sick, and it quietly erodes your confidence in your own account of what is happening to you. Patients move between specialists collecting tests, theories and bills, and each visit that ends in nothing found makes the next one harder to walk into.

A framework was validating but it was not a cure. Lauren and her husband read everything they could find. She began working with clinicians familiar with CIRS and the Shoemaker Protocol while the family took on a full remediation of the house — the step Dorninger singles out as the hardest part of the process, not because the principle is complicated but because it usually means leaving, gutting or losing the place you live.

Progress came unevenly, and slowly enough that she doubted it while it was happening. "I had hope for the first time. I doubted the process, no doubt, because it was slow. But I didn't give up."

The Problem of Getting Better

Recovery brought something she had not budgeted for. Illness had taken up nearly every available part of her life. Appointments to arrange, research to run down, symptoms to manage — hers, and her children's. Health had become the organizing principle of the household and, functionally, a full-time job. When some of that weight began to lift, Lauren found herself in what she calls an identity crisis. She had wanted nothing more than to be well. The path to wellness then gave her another question: who am I after years of organizing my life just to get through the day?

Her answer was not a return to who she had been. She went back to weight training. She became more deliberate about who she kept close and more protective of her time. She stopped looking as hard for outside validation, and got comfortable setting limits around the people, places and environments she let in.

"Once you start healing and you've kind of gone through hell and come back out of it, you have a whole new perspective on life." And then, almost absurdly, one more obstacle presented itself. After nearly a year of remediation and renovation the family finally moved back into the house. The following month, Lauren broke her back.

The injury was serious. Her reaction to it surprised her. In the ambulance she remembers thinking that this, at least, was something she understood. There was an injury. There would be treatment. There was a visible problem with a comprehensible path out of it. Measured against the ambiguity of the preceding years, a broken back felt almost straightforward. She made a full recovery from that too.

Where CBD Came In, and When

There was the environment. There were physicians and practitioners. There was a year of remediation. There were protocols and therapies. And then, later — well after the hard structural work was underway — there was CBD.

Lauren was not a convert. She had tried CBD before and concluded it did very little for her: cheap oils bought online and from general retailers, with underwhelming enough results that when a doctor recommended Blue Sky CBD, she ignored the suggestion outright. "I've tried many CBD products in the past and nothing worked."

What changed her mind was the one problem that had outlasted everything else. Lauren had struggled to fall asleep long before she got sick — a lifelong night owl, by her own description — and during the worst stretches of the illness, sleep became one more thing that had been taken from her. She tried Blue Sky CBD Sleep Gels.

She was already tracking her sleep, which meant she had something less forgiving than memory to check the result against. Her scores had been sitting in the low 50s. After she started the Sleep Gels, she says they began reaching the 90s. Over time she added other products, including Max Relief. She reaches for the Sleep formulations when sleep is the problem, and Max Relief during stretches of discomfort or when she feels physically run down.

CBN & CBG Isolates

Lauren noticed that Blue Sky CBD's formulas did something other brands' hadn't. They are made from 100% isolates rather than full-spectrum blends, and she credits that purity and the higher dosing for the difference.

Lauren works with people who describe sensitivities to supplements, foods and environmental exposures, and for that population a straight-forward formulation is worth more than a complicated one. Blue Sky CBD builds with isolated cannabinoids rather than full-spectrum extract, which means the label can say exactly what is in the product and how much. The formulas run on three cannabinoid profiles: Original is CBD alone; Sleep pairs CBD with CBN at roughly one to one; Max Relief pairs CBD with CBG. Every batch is third-party tested and the lab reports are published, which is how a customer can check a claim instead of taking it at face value.

CBG deserves understanding on its own terms. It is sometimes called the mother cannabinoid because it is the biosynthetic precursor the plant converts into CBD and THC, and because it survives in most mature hemp only at very low concentrations, formulating with it in any real quantity is a deliberate and expensive decision. The preclinical literature is genuinely interesting: across cell and animal models CBG has shown anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity, including in studies of neutrophil-driven inflammation and in arthritis models. More human research is needed but the implications are encouraging.

The same discipline applies to CBN, the cannabinoid in the Sleep formulations. It is widely used in sleep products and the clinical human evidence has yet to be fully understood. What Lauren has is her own tracked data over time, showing consistent improvements in falling, and staying, asleep. 

What CBD Doesn't Do

It is tempting, in wellness writing, to make one product the hero of a recovery. Lauren's experience refuses the shape. CBD did not cure her illness. It did not find the mold, dry the plumbing trap, remediate the house, or stand in for the physicians and protocols she was working through. It arrived toward the end of a  long process, as one tool among many, and what she describes it doing is specific: making certain symptoms more manageable while the actual work of recovery went on around it.

That distinction isn’t just legal throat-clearing. It is the difference between a product that helps someone sleep through a hard year and a product being asked to do something no supplement can do. In Lauren’s case, she was sick in a home that was making her sick, and remediating the toxic mold was the first step towards becoming healthy again.

As her health came back, Lauren started telling people what had happened to her. At first she was just telling the story. Then people began finding themselves in it. One conversation became dozens; dozens became thousands. Today she works remotely with people navigating CIRS and related conditions, using a map she had to draw herself because nobody handed her one.

She knows what it is to be frightened enough to make enormous decisions quickly. She knows the pull to read every new symptom as catastrophe. She knows how expensive the search for an answer gets — and she has strong opinions, earned the hard way, about how much of that expense is fear rather than information. She often recommends Blue Sky CBD to the people she works with as an option for symptom support while they pursue care from qualified medical professionals.

There were years of uncertainty and diagnoses that never fit. There were costly decisions she would make differently now. There was a house her family fled and then moved back into. There was improvement, and then a broken back. There are still stretches when she does not feel her best.

Recovery did not delete any of that. It changed her relationship to it. She no longer regards a CIRS diagnosis as the sentence that newly diagnosed patients are braced for. To her, it’s just the starting line: an explanation, a direction, and the ability to make informed decisions where before there was only uncertainty.

To people currently experiencing the valley of this diagnosis — the appointments, the questions, the suspicion that life will never look familiar again — she does not offer an easy answer. She offers perspective: “Protect your peace. Pay attention to the people and places around you. Find practitioners who will listen. Build a team. Give yourself permission to make your health the priority rather than the thing you get to after everything else.”

And “do not mistake the difficulty of the moment for permanence.” She says it with the authority of someone who once had very little reason to believe it. Today, Lauren helps people find a path forward through advocacy, speaking engagements, and insight into CIRS with Dr. Dorninger. You can learn more about her by following her on instagram @thebiotoxinlady or explore more resources directly at www.cirsx.com.