My Gut Health Story: How Years of Antibiotics, Chronic UTIs, and Cystic Acne Led Me to Build Synapticor
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In 2020, I walked into a bathroom in my college apartment and looked down at something that stopped me cold. Bright neon green-yellow. Not a color a body is supposed to produce. I remember standing there, genuinely scared, wondering what was happening inside me.
That moment sent me to a doctor, who ran a quick check and told me I was gluten intolerant. Avoid gluten, he said. That was it. Fifteen minutes, one instruction, out the door.
Here’s the thing, that appointment wasn’t wrong, exactly. It just wasn’t the whole story. Nobody asked why a 22-year-old who’d never had a food sensitivity in her life suddenly couldn’t process gluten. Nobody connected it to the chronic UTIs I’d been living with, or the cystic acne, or the fact that I’d basically grown up on antibiotics. They treated the symptom in front of them and sent me on my way, which is exactly how most of conventional medicine works, and exactly what led me to build Synapticor five years later.
But I have to back up, because this didn’t start in that bathroom. It started when I was a kid.
where it actually began: strep throat and a decade of antibiotics
Growing up in South Dakota, I got strep throat constantly. We’re talking ten-plus times a year, every year, for most of my childhood. Every time, the answer was the same: antibiotics. So my body spent years cycling through round after round of them, until my tonsils were eventually removed altogether.
I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of everything. Antibiotics don’t just kill the bacteria making you sick, they wipe out the good bacteria in your gut too, the ones your entire digestive and immune system depend on. And there’s research suggesting that removing your tonsils, the tissue that’s supposed to catch bad bacteria before it ever reaches your throat, can send more of that bacteria straight down into your gut instead. So by the time I hit college, my gut had already been through more damage than most people’s go through in a lifetime. I just didn’t have a name for it yet.
Then came the bloating. The constipation. The years of chronic UTIs that had me in urgent care almost every week, sometimes multiple times a week, for what felt like forever. More antibiotics, on repeat, for close to two years straight. If you’ve had a chronic UTI, you know the specific kind of exhausted, humiliated, at-your-wit’s-end feeling that comes with being in pain and having no real answers. I lived there for a long time.
I also had cystic acne that wouldn’t quit, and I was desperate enough that I went on Accutane for a full year. It worked, for a while. Then it came back and Accutane is brutal on your gut, too. Looking back, I was just adding more damage on top of damage, chasing symptoms one at a time with nothing that ever addressed why any of it was happening in the first place.
the class that changed everything
In college I was pre-health, weighing PA school or nursing, when I took an elective on integrative and holistic health almost by accident. I had never been so consumed by a class in my life. Something about it made sense to me in a way nothing else had, the idea that the body isn’t a collection of separate parts to medicate individually, but one interconnected system, and that symptoms are information, not just problems to silence.
That class is what sent me down a research rabbit hole into gut health and my chronic UTIs, because I was so done with being on antibiotics constantly. That’s where I found D-mannose and uva ursi, two natural compounds that actually resolved what years of prescriptions couldn’t. I haven’t had a chronic UTI since. My mom, who’d dealt with the same thing for years, started using them too, and it changed her life. People still message me to this day asking what I used, because so many of us are quietly dealing with the exact same thing and getting the exact same bandaid treatment.
That was the first time I felt the specific kind of pride that comes from actually helping someone heal, instead of just managing their symptoms. I didn’t know it yet, but that feeling was the beginning of Synapticor.
the hospital job that broke something open in me
After graduation, I took a job at a hospital, and it might be the thing that shaped my whole outlook on healthcare more than anything else. I watched patients cycle in and out, over and over, handed a new prescription each time to blanket whatever symptom brought them in, never anything that addressed the actual root cause. The goal wasn’t healing. The goal was getting them stable enough to walk back out the door until the next flare-up brought them right back in.
It was depressing in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I couldn’t understand how an entire system built around “healthcare” could be so uninterested in actually making people well. That job left me more lost than I’d ever been.
Around that time, my boyfriend wanted to move to Arizona. I’d never even visited. I had no family there, no friends, no plan, just a growing certainty that I couldn’t keep living the reality I was in. So I went.
becoming the patient: what a real root-cause workup looks like
I found a job as an office manager for a naturopathic doctor in Arizona, and it changed the entire trajectory of my life. My boss was brilliant, I watched her patients walk in with problems they’d been dismissed for everywhere else and actually get better. And one of the biggest gifts of that job was that I got to become her patient too.
She did a full workup on me: gluten testing, food sensitivity panels, bloodwork, Genova metabolomix testing, genetic testing, SIBO testing. Everything under the sun. For the first time in my life, someone was actually looking at what was happening inside my body instead of guessing from the outside.
What we found: my gut was severely inflamed, and I had leaky gut, a condition where the lining of your intestines becomes too permeable, letting things leak into your bloodstream that were never supposed to get there. Years of antibiotics and Accutane had wiped out my beneficial bacteria almost entirely. I had candida overgrowth. A growing list of new food intolerances I’d never had before. Chronic fatigue, constant headaches, acne, soreness, all of it, tracing back to one root: a gut lining that had been damaged for over a decade and never once repaired.
why the gut lining is the whole story
Here’s what I learned during that period that I now build my entire life and business around: your gut lining is one of the most important structures in your entire body, and almost nobody talks about it.
That lining is a single layer of cells that decides what gets absorbed into your bloodstream and what gets kept out, nutrients in, toxins and undigested particles out. It also houses a huge portion of your immune system and produces neurotransmitters that directly affect your mood and energy. When that barrier is healthy, your body runs the way it’s supposed to. When it’s damaged from antibiotics, from chronic stress, from medications like Accutane, from a diet that’s constantly feeding inflammation instead of healing it, it becomes permeable. That’s leaky gut. And once things start leaking through that shouldn’t, your body reacts. Inflammation shows up. Your immune system gets confused and overreacts. And because everything in your body is interconnected, that shows up as skin problems, mood swings, exhaustion, bloating, food sensitivities that seem to multiply overnight, all of it tracing back to one damaged barrier.
This is why bandaid medicine fails so many of us. You can medicate the acne, medicate the bloating, medicate the fatigue, one prescription at a time, and never once ask why your body is producing all of these symptoms simultaneously. The answer is almost always the same starting point: an inflamed, depleted, unrepaired gut lining. Heal that, and the rest of the symptoms tend to resolve on their own, because you finally addressed the actual cause instead of the noise it was making.
how i actually healed
We didn’t fix any of this overnight, and we didn’t fix it with more prescriptions. We did it with the compounds your body already knows how to use: L-glutamine and slippery elm bark to rebuild the gut lining itself, along with aloe and ginger to calm the inflammation. I used binders to clear out what didn’t belong, added digestive enzymes to help my body actually break down and absorb food again, and only once my gut lining was repaired did we introduce pre- and probiotics to repopulate it with the beneficial bacteria I’d lost years earlier.
I went from a body that would go a full week without a bowel movement, or swing the other direction into chronic diarrhea, to being genuinely regular for the first time since I was a kid. It took trial and error. It took real money spent on testing and supplements most people never think to ask their doctor about. But it worked, because we were finally treating the root instead of managing the symptom.
And here’s the part I want every person reading this to actually hear: most people are walking around with some version of a compromised gut lining right now, and don’t know it. A round of antibiotics for a sinus infection. A stomach bug that never quite resolved. Years of stress nobody accounted for. These are normal life events, not rare misfortunes, which means gut lining repair isn’t a niche concern. It’s something almost everyone needs and almost nobody is doing.
the moment synapticor became real
For years after that, I bounced around, I ran a pet-sitting business that grew into something full-time, I took a remote job that eventually fell apart and through all of it, my boyfriend kept bringing up the idea of starting our own company. I didn’t know what I’d build until I asked myself the obvious question: what am I actually passionate about? The answer was never in question. Gut health, and healing the body from the root instead of masking what it’s trying to tell you.
That was 2023. I had zero business experience. I formed the LLC, filed the legal paperwork, trademarked the name, found a manufacturer, worked with formulation scientists on dosages backed by real research, found a designer to bring the brand to life, sourced packaging after nearly having to pivot entirely, found a photographer, built the website, taught myself more than I ever expected to learn. It took three years longer than I wanted it to largely because I was terrified of being seen. Social media anxiety held me back in a way I’m still working through, and I’m telling you that honestly because I know so many of you are in that same spot, sitting on something real and too scared to say it out loud.
Last October, my dad went through a health crisis that landed him in and out of the hospital for a month, it started with a parasite that destroyed his gut, triggered his diabetes into a dangerous spiral, and put his liver at risk. I spent nights sleeping in that hospital, watching a system that was supposed to help him treat his care like an inconvenience. We ended up figuring out the actual cause ourselves. It was terrifying, and it was also the moment that made the decision for me: I moved back to South Dakota this year to put everything I had into this business, into the belief that people deserve real answers about their own bodies, not just the next prescription.
We got our product in hand this spring. Synapticor Gut Repair is built on the exact framework that healed me, a twelve ingredient, natural gut health supplement formulated to support and rebuild the gut lining, because that lining is the foundation everything else stands on. I didn’t set out to build “a supplement.” I set out to build the gut health supplement I searched for and couldn’t find back when I needed it most, one that actually targets gut lining repair instead of just masking bloating for a few hours. Interconnected Health isn’t a tagline I picked because it sounded nice. It’s the actual belief this entire brand is built on: your skin, your energy, your mood, your immune system, none of it is separate. It all traces back to your gut.
why i’m telling you all of this
I’m not sharing this because I think my story is unique. I’m sharing it because I know it isn’t. If you’re dealing with bloating you can’t explain, skin that won’t clear no matter what you put on it, energy that never fully comes back, or a doctor who handed you a prescription and sent you out the door without ever asking why, I see you, and I’ve been exactly there.
This Substack is where I’m going to keep having this conversation. Real information about gut health, gut lining repair, what actually causes leaky gut, how to tell if your gut is the reason nothing else is working, what to actually look for in a gut health supplement, and what root-cause healing looks like versus what gets marketed as it. Not clinical, not preachy, just what I wish someone had handed me back when I was standing in that bathroom, scared and with no answers.
If any part of this felt familiar, I’d love for you to stick around. Subscribe, tell me your story in the comments, and let’s actually start talking about the thing at the center of all of it, the gut.