Putting Pieces Together…Living with Post-Infectious Gut Dysfunction

Living with post-infectious gut dysfunction feels like being thrown into whitewater rapids.

You’re not floating peacefully.

You’re not even swimming.

You’re being pulled under by invisible currents.

At first, you assume it will pass. The infection is over. The labs look fine. You’re told your body just needs time.

But something is off.

Food starts reacting differently.

Throbbing headaches emerge.

Brain fog rolls in without warning.

Fatigue and weakness buckle your knees onto the couch.

Your nervous system feels like it’s humming in the background.

Pain and aching in joints and muscles appear.

Hair thins.

Twitching.

You try to explain it, but it’s hard to describe something that feels kinda everywhere.

So you go looking for answers.

Every time a doctor gives you a diagnosis, it feels like grabbing a branch hanging over the river:

“It’s mast cells.”

“It’s SIBO.”

“It’s mitochondria.”

“It’s dysautonomia.”

“It’s Lymes.”

“It’s Long Covid”

You grab the branch with hope.

Finally.

A name.

A plan.

A protocol.

And sometimes, for a moment, it helps. The water feels calmer. You think maybe this is it.

But then the current shifts.

The symptoms return.

Or new ones appear.

Or the improvements don’t hold.

And you’re swept downstream again.

Exhausted, doubting, doubting everything! Wondering what is happening, what is missing ...

The problem isn’t that the branches aren’t real diagnoses. They just don’t tell the whole story.

Mast cell activation is real.

SIBO is real.

Mitochondrial dysfunction is real.

Dysautonomia is real.

Vitamin deficiency is real.

Hormonal disruptions are real.

But addressing each one separately never seems to heal you…

The reason is no one is looking at the whole river!

After an infection, the invader may be gone, but the terrain is altered:

The gut lining stays raw and irritated.

Protective, healing, good gut guys are erased.

Mast cells (heavily concentrated in the gut) can remain on high alert.

Hormones become altered.

Nutrition depleted.

When infection changes the gut, it doesn’t just cause bloating.

It can ripple outward to the whole body, affecting energy, mind, circulation, immune responses, and tolerance to foods that were once safe.

And when each specialist looks only at their branch, no one zooms out enough to see the current pulling you under.

That’s what makes post-infectious gut dysfunction so isolating, confusing, and seemingly without answers when only one branch is seen.

It’s layered.

It’s systemic (full body involved).

It doesn’t always respond to standardized “gut reset” protocols.

Sometimes it requires careful rebuilding.

Sometimes it requires restoring what was lost.

Mainly, it requires approaching the gut, immune system, and nervous system as ONE (not three separate ones).

It requires acknowledging that your experience is more complex and doesn’t fit neatly into a single box.

______________________________________________________

Living in these rapids changes you.

It teaches you how fragile stability can feel.

It teaches you how differently treatments considered “risky” land when your life is no longer living, but surviving.

It teaches you how lost and lonely it feels when you’re left assembling your own medical puzzle.

But it also teaches something else…

That you are more than a single diagnosis or condition.

With time, you can start to recognize the patterns in the current. Ways to get your life back.

By seeing how mast cells, microbiome loss, lingering allergies, nervous system, and hormone dysregulation aren’t random branches. These are interacting forces within the same river.

You realize healing may not be about grabbing harder onto one diagnosis.

It’s about learning how to navigate the whole system.

Over time, I began researching, experimenting, asking different questions, and looking at my body as an interconnected ecosystem instead of isolated problems. I stopped chasing single labels and started mapping the river.

That shift changed everything.

Not overnight.

Not perfectly.

But steadily.

There is a difference between drowning in rapids and navigating them on a raft.

A raft doesn’t eliminate the current.

It gives you structure.

Perspective.

A way to move with intention instead of being pulled under.

What changed for me wasn’t finding one perfect branch.

It was learning how to map the river. How allergies, microbiome loss, lingering immune issues, nervous system disruption all interact as one river.

If you’ve felt like you’re drowning in disconnected answers, you’re not alone.

You’re dealing with a complex system that needs to be seen as a whole.

There is a way to approach this differently.

And you don’t have to navigate the river alone.

If you’d like help navigating this, I offer consultations to help you piece it all together: https://drrachaellarson.com/book-consultation