I don’t know if anyone reading this can relate, but imagine living with an undiagnosed, chronic condition for eight years. During what are supposed to be the prime years of your life. Imagine knowing your body is breaking down, but every doctor, and even your own family, looks at you like you’re a little bit crazy.
That was me. And it all started with one pill I took in Mexico in 2018.
One Pill in Mexico: How It Started
I was living the dream…or at least the version of it I had sold myself on. Digital nomad life. Hopping from café to café with a laptop, eating new and healthy foods, exploring a new city every few weeks.
My friends and I were staying in an Airbnb in Mexico City for a month. We had just come off one of the best meals of my life at a Michelin star restaurant that absolutely blew us away. A few nights later, a local spot brought in a guest chef from Oaxaca. We ordered the pre-fix menu, which had something different on it. A tostada with three different preparations of raw fish. I don’t know exactly what it was, but whatever it was… it introduced some unwanted guests into my digestive system.
I was running to the bathroom every 30 minutes. And I had a flight to catch to Guadalajara in two days…there was NO WAY I was going to make it through the flight let alone the airport like this. So I did what any desperate person would do and I decided to take some antibiotics.
A friend of mine happened to have been prescribed a few different brands. I looked at what his doctor had recommended, figured one or two doses couldn’t hurt, and picked the ones that sounded reasonable, even though everything on the label was in Spanish and I couldn’t fully research what I was taking.
I took two pills and the bathroom problem stopped immediately. Thank God! I thought I had won.
I didn’t know it yet, but that single, seemingly harmless decision was about to drastically alter my biological health and the entire trajectory of my life.
The Long-Term Side Effects of Cipro Nobody Warned Me About
One of those pills was Ciproflox.
Cipro belongs to a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, and fluoroquinolones carry a black box warning. Not everyone reacts the same way, but for some people, they cause serious damage. The fluoride molecules in the drug are so highly charged that they can permeate membranes other medications can’t touch…reaching deep into your nervous system, your connective tissue, and even your mitochondria. The literal energy centers of your cells.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. All I knew was that things started going wrong…and kept going wrong.
First, my gut. The immediate win of stopping the bathroom issue came at a cost: my appetite disappeared entirely. My gut lining was inflamed. Foods I’d eaten my whole life suddenly bloated me. Fiber, supposedly healthy, made things worse. My digestion wasn’t really digesting anymore. I ate because I knew I had to, not because I felt hunger.
Then came the countless “vague symptoms” that Western Medicine struggles to work with. Brain fog. Fatigue that didn’t respond to sleep. A nervous system that felt like it was permanently stuck in high alert. “Benign fasciculations” that I knew damn well weren’t benign. I developed a stutter at one point. My muscles were getting tight and I started injuring myself more easily. (I had to take a break from working out for years.) Allergies I’d never had before showed up out of nowhere. My immune system, which had always reliable for the first 27 years of my life, started failing me.
From the outside, I looked fine…and in a way that was the worst part. Since many professionals simply said “you’re fine”. But the amount of mental and emotional tax this was costing me was no joke. Not only was my cognitive capacity declining…I was being gaslit constantly. I was questioning myself all the time, but I KNEW that something was wrong with me…even if I didn’t know what it was…yet.
Eight Years of Trying Everything: Why Conventional Approaches Failed
Deciding that I needed a break from the travel, in 2019 I moved to Puerto Rico. This gave me a chance to try everything conventional wisdom told me to do.
I changed my diet. Added fiber. Took probiotics. Took prebiotics. Drank aloe vera gel to soothe my gut. Made bone broth. Ttook collagen. Grew my own broccoli sprouts on my counter for the sulforaphane. Quit my job to have “less stress.” Meditated. Napped. Walked on the beach. Exercised more. Exercised less….
The list goes on. And on. And on.
At a certain point I had essentially become the healthiest person I knew, from a lifestyle perspective, and I still wasn’t better. Then COVID hit and I figured, what the heck,I’ll go vegan. Six months in, that wasn’t the answer either.
A friend of mine had been sharing a different perspective, and eventually he convinced me to try the exact opposite: carnivore. No plants. No fiber. Just meat. And for the first time in three years… something actually started to shift.
It turns out that by completely removing fiber, my gut lining could finally start to heal without constantly being irritated. The brain fog started to lift. My energy started to come back and my nerves were calming down. This was one of the first times I realized: the opposite of conventional wisdom was actually what worked for me.
I stayed carnivore for about five years. I was improving, but I knew I still wasn’t fully there.
Around this time, living in Puerto Rico, I also picked up what I suspected were parasites, and I was certainly being exposed to significant mold in my environment. So I decided to leave and to move to Tampa, Florida, in search of better healthcare and a cleaner environment.
Unfortunately, that turned into its own can of worms. I started noticing I’d feel worse every time I came home and better every time I left. My cheeks would puff up. My brain fog would thicken. It took me a while but eventually I traced it to the air quality in the house: molds, oak pollen, an overgrown neighborhood that Florida just doesn’t maintain the way other states do. I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to solve it. New HVAC, new ducting, new insulation, air purifiers, UV lights, ozone, hot fogging, cold fogging, testing, etc, etc. None of it fully worked. Eventually, I had to move out entirely, find a new house, buy a new car, and hope for a fresh start.
All of that on top of an already-damaged system that I unknowingly was carrying inside me everywhere I went.
At a certain point it almost becomes funny. I was spinning my wheels through every abstract layer of wellness, thinking, what the heck, I’ve got nothing to lose. But I was just crunching through symptoms, completely missing the actual machine.
Getting Floxed: When I Finally Had a Name for What Happened
Eight years after Mexico, I finally found the word for what had happened to me: I was “foxed.”
Technically its called fluoroquinolone toxicity. (And yes even one pill can do it to you.) There are entire communities of people living with this…and some far worse off than I was. The damage isn’t just to the gut. It goes deeper, to the cellular level and the organelle level…specifically to the mitochondria.
And that’s when something finally clicked after all these years.
My mitochondria, the physical energy centers of my cells, had been chemically damaged. Which meant my cells couldn’t produce energy efficiently. Which meant my nervous system (and entire body) was running on a depleted, dysregulated supply of fuel. Chronically. For years. No wonder my immune system was weak…no wonder my sexual energy had “dried up”…no wonder I didn’t have the bandwidth to think and process and problem solve to the level I had before.
It FINALLY all made sense! And this again proved something that I knew to be true: Unless you solve the actual root cause at the lowest level possible, everything else is just managing symptoms. In this case…the lowest level was literally sub-cellular…and all the other issues from there were merely symptoms of that.
Isn’t it interesting how we get so caught up in all the surface-level layers – the diets, the labels, the supplements, the routines – when the answer is almost always at a lower level we’re simply not aware of? If there’s one thing that Silicon Valley taught me as a software engineer…it was to fix problems at the root. Band-aid solutions just cause more problems than they’re worth in the long term.
What I learned after all that is if you’re not working at the root level, you’re wasting time. And if you don’t know what the root level is, then keep asking questions and discovering. When you do find the root cause…things will finally all make sense.
It was no surprise that in this case, as I’ve mentioned in other articles, that the lowest common denominator again came down to energy.
How I Found Somatic Healing as a Fluoroquinolone Toxicity Recovery Tool
You probably remember this from biology class: the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. It generates ATP: the energy that your cells run on. And cells are just building blocks for larger systems: the immune system, the cardiovascular system, every organ in your body. If your cells can’t generate energy, your systems can’t function. Which explains why everything was breaking down, all the way up to the more abstract layers like the mental and emotional ones.
Because here’s what I started to realize: energy isn’t just a physical or “woo” thing. There’s a bio-energy that runs through your nervous system, your fascia, every cell in your body. The “chi” that ancient traditions have talked about for thousands of years. I’d always written that off as woo. But the more I dug, the more I couldn’t ignore it…because it was the only framework that explained everything I was experiencing across every layer.
I’m passionate about root cause solutions if you can’t tell. More than that, I’m passionate about having the right tool for the right job. And if you don’t know what the actual root-level job is… you’ll keep using the wrong tools and wonder why nothing sticks.
Let’s take a step back for a couple paragraphs…
One day in 2019, during what I can only describe as an experimental meditation, something unexpected happened. I felt a small piece of that toxic emotional charge, the sludge I’d been carrying for years, actually dissolve. Not conceptually. Physically. I felt lighter for the rest of the day. So I did it again. And again. Over several months, the mental and emotional symptoms I’d been battling quietly started to clear.
This somatic self-practice was producing results more reliably than any supplement, protocol, or pill I had tried. It took me a long time to understand the mechanism, but eventually it clicked. What I was doing was unbinding trapped energy in my body, allowing it to integrate and be used rather than sitting locked in tissue. For someone with damaged mitochondria, damaged energy generators, that wasn’t just emotional relief. It was biological recycling.
I became obsessed with this process and started teaching it to friends. They got it and they felt it too.
But I still couldn’t fully explain what it was. I spent years searching for anyone working in a similar way. A few scattered references in books. Nothing that satisfied my software-engineering brain. Until I came across a Netflix episode featuring Dr. John Amaral. And it finally answered it all.
Here was someone doing the same category of work I had been doing on myself…but he was doing it for someone else, while they lay on a table. The results were visceral, visible, undeniable. For the first time I felt completely seen in what I had been quietly discovering on my own.
In 2025 I started studying under Dr. John, and at that moment, I decided my twelve years of software engineering would come to an end.
Not because software was bad. It gave me freedom, flexibility, and a life I designed. But I had always known it wasn’t my final destination. This was. Somatic energy work, helping people clear what they’re carrying at the deepest level, and teaching them tools they can use on their own, anytime, anywhere…this is what I’m here to do.
Stop Managing Symptoms. Go to the Root.
I’ll be honest…it’s hard to fully see the gift of an eight-year war while you’re still living in the aftermath. But now, the dots all connect looking backwards (as Steve Jobs wisely said)..
I grew up in an atheist household. The idea that I had a “calling”, some specific reason for being here, took me a long time to accept. For years I chased directions that were close but not quite right. Software. Business ventures. Financial projects. Real estate. I kept moving, kept building, kept searching.
It turns out these eight years of invisible, complex, toxic, chronic war were the lessons I needed to go through to find my place.
The chronic illness forced me to go deeper than most people are willing to go. It stripped away every surface-level solution until only the root remained. It taught me, experientially, not intellectually, that the body holds everything. That energy is the common denominator beneath the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual layers we spend so much time trying to manage separately.
And it gave me something no certification or training program could have: I know what it feels like to be in it. To have your family lose patience. Feeling invisibly broken inside a body that’s failing. Spending years searching for answers in a system that isn’t designed to find them.
If you’re reading this and you’re on that journey, whether it’s fluoroquinolone toxicity, mold exposure, chronic illness, or just the heavy invisible weight of years of unprocessed stress, I want you to hear this: you are not crazy. And you are not average. The fact that you’re still searching, still digging, still refusing to accept “just manage the symptoms” as a final answer…that puts you in rare company.
Most people don’t look for the lower-level answers. They’re invisible, they’re subtle, and they require a kind of patience and intellectual humility that not everyone has.
You clearly do.
So keep going. Find people who’ve been through it. Learn from their mistakes. And accelerate your own path.
Take it from a Silicon Valley software engineer…there’s almost always a better way. You just have to go find it.
If this resonated and you want to explore what somatic energy work could do for you, I’d love to connect. Visit me at tophuman.co to learn more, connect, or book a session.