First Day Vitamins ad: If she’s still breaking out… READ THIS☝️

In eighteen months I asked for four rounds of antibiotics for my daughter's acne, and the pharmacist filling the fourth one was the first person to tell me what nobody at that dermatologist's office ever did. I only know this because she wasn't supposed to be working that day. So if your dermatologist is still writing scripts, and the acne comes back worse every time she finishes one, and now they're starting to say the word Accutane… Please, please PLEASE read this whole thing. Because I was two weeks out from putting my fifteen year old on that drug and I had no idea what I was about to do to her. My name is Michelle Williams, and I'm 41 with a fifteen-year-old daughter. And a woman I'd never met before, who I'll never see again, is the only reason my daughter isn't on Accutane right now. She was thirteen when it started. Just a few bumps on her forehead. I figured it was puberty. So we did what everyone does. CeraVe. Benzoyl peroxide. Salicylic pads. Those little patches she'd stick on before bed. I even bought her one of those LED masks off TikTok. A hundred and forty dollars. None of it made a dent. And by fourteen it was on her chin, her jaw, her cheeks. Deep cysts, the size of silver dollars, that hurt before you even touched them. So we went to a dermatologist. He looked at her for four minutes and gave us Tretinoin. Eight weeks. Eight weeks later we were right back in there, still breaking out in the same places. So he added Doxycycline. And that one actually worked. Her skin calmed right down. I stood in the bathroom doorway one morning just watching her do her makeup for school and I thought, okay. We found it. Then it started making her nauseous and she had to come off it. And everything came back worse than before. So I asked him for another course. And that one worked too. Just not as well. So I asked for another one. And by the third round it barely even touched her. That's when he told me some people just have stubborn skin. He said it kindly. He genuinely meant it. And I held onto that sentence for about a year, because it meant nobody had done anything wrong. Then he put her on Spironolactone. Three months. She gained weight. Her mood changed. She told me one night she just didn't feel like herself anymore. And she was still breaking out. She stopped wanting to be in pictures. She stopped going out with her friends, and when I asked her why, she said it was because her skin hurt. And in October she texted me from school, crying, because of what some kid had said to her. And somewhere in there I stopped being kind about it. I decided she was picking at them on purpose. That's why they were scarring. For about a week I let myself believe my own daughter was doing this to her own face. I've never said that out loud to anyone. Then we went back in January, and he looked at her for four minutes. "At this point, Accutane is really the only option left." I told him we'd think about it. And that night I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and I looked it up. Because he'd said the word, and then moved straight on to the paperwork. So I found out the way everybody else finds out. On my own. At midnight. From strangers. The bloodwork every month. The lips that crack and bleed. The joint pain. And then the depression warnings. There was a mother in Ohio whose son came off it two years ago, and she said he "never really came back." I sat there reading that thread until almost two in the morning. And I decided no. Not my kid. And I felt good about that decision for exactly nine days. Because then she came down the hall at nine at night and just stopped in the kitchen doorway. She didn't come in. She stood there with one hand on the frame. "Mom." "Yeah, honey." "Can we just do the Accutane." "I don't think we should. I read about it. There's stuff in there that scares me." "I read it too." She said it flat. Like it was a grocery list. "I don't care." "Sweetheart, some kids get really depressed on it. There are girls your age who." "Mom." She hadn't moved an inch since she got to that doorway. "I don't go anywhere. I don't see anyone. I haven't even sent a picture of myself to anybody in a year." She said it like she was telling me the weather. And I just stood there in my kitchen and I didn't say anything. She wasn't even crying. She'd done all her crying about a year ago. She just stood in that doorway and waited for me to give her a reason. And I didn't have one. "Okay," I said. She nodded. Went back down the hall. Shut her door. And I sat down at that table and I felt sick. We went back in that Thursday and they enrolled her in iPLEDGE. The booklet you sign before they'll give you the drug. She'd start in March. I signed it at the front desk with a pen off the counter. I didn't even read it. I already knew what it said. And on the way out he wrote her one more round of antibiotics. Just to hold her steady until the thirty days were up. So I put the booklet in my purse and we drove over to the pharmacy to fill it. Same pharmacy we'd been going to for two years. Same woman behind the counter every time. Older, silver hair, knew my daughter's name, always asked how school was going. But she wasn't in that day. There was somebody new. Younger. Maybe thirty. She took the script. She read it. Then she read it again. "How long has she been on antibiotics?" I had to actually stop and count. "About a year and a half?" "How many courses is that?" And I just stood there at the counter doing the math in my head. "Four." And she didn't say anything for a second. So I looked down at her name tag. Rachel Sandoval, PharmD. Somebody I'd never once seen behind that counter. "Has anyone talked to you about what these have been doing to her gut?" I had my keys in my hand already. "Her gut's fine. It's her skin." "Right," she said. "I know." But she still didn't hand me the bag. "How long has she been coming off them and having it come back worse?" And I just stood there for a second. "How did you know that." She put the bag down on the counter. "Because that's what they do." She said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. Like I should have known. "Do you have five minutes?" My daughter was out in the car. I'd been in that building eleven minutes and I wanted to be gone. "Five minutes for what." "Because she's going to keep coming off these and it's going to keep coming back. And the next thing they offer you is Accutane." "They already did." I took the booklet out of my purse and put it on the counter between us. She looked at it. Then she looked at me. "Okay," I said. "Five minutes." She called someone over to take the register. Then she came around the counter and stood next to me. "Can I ask what you've tried?" I went through it. The creams. The Tretinoin. The antibiotics. She waited until I was done. "And what were all of those for?" "Her skin." "Right." And I remember thinking, okay, here we go. This is where she tells me it's the pillowcase, or the dairy, or the stress. But she leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. "Your dermatologist is a skin doctor." "He trained for years to look at skin. So when you brought her in, he looked at her skin." "And when that didn't work, he went stronger." "And when that didn't work, he went to a pill." She said it like she felt bad for him. "He's not a bad doctor. He did exactly what he was trained to do." "Okay. So what's the part he's not trained for." "When she hit puberty, her hormones spiked. That happens to every kid, that's normal." "But those hormones don't just show up on her face." She paused. "They go into her gut and they throw the whole thing out of balance. There's good bacteria in there and there's bad bacteria in there, and during that shift, the good ones lose ground." "They irritate the gut wall. That irritation is inflammation." "And inflammation has to come out somewhere." She stopped. "It's coming out on her face." I looked at the clock behind her. "Her hormones are going to settle down eventually. She's fifteen. Doesn't that fix itself?" She shook her head. "The hormones didn't cause it." She paused. "They just opened the door. And the bad bacteria walked in, and they don't leave. They live there now." "Then how does anyone grow out of it." "That door opens for every kid. Every single one of them. But in some of them, the good bacteria were strong enough to fight back and kick them out." She flattened her hand out on the counter. "Those are the kids who clear up. Not because they waited. Because their gut won." "And the ones who don't?" I asked. "There wasn't enough in there to fight with. So they stayed." And I stood in that pharmacy with my keys still in my hand and I did the math. "So how do you know which one my daughter is." She didn't answer me right away. "How long has it been?" "Two years." She didn't say anything. She just held my eyes for a second, and I watched her decide whether to say it. "A gut that was winning wouldn't still be doing that after two years." I didn't say anything. "And it doesn't sit still, either. Every month she's in there fighting on her own, they take a little more room. And they get a little harder to move." "She starts Accutane in March." I don't know why I said it. It just came out. She nodded slowly. "Do you know what it actually does?" And nobody had asked me that. Not the dermatologist. Not the nurse. Not the woman who handed me the booklet. "It works," she said. "I'll tell you that first, because it does." "It goes after the oil glands. Those are the ones that keep her skin and her lips from cracking." "It shrinks them." She paused. "Not for the six months she's on it." "For good." I didn't say anything. "And it dries out a gut that's already inflamed." "So the acne goes quiet." She looked at me. "But nothing in there ever changes. That's why so many of them are back in that office a year later doing a second round." "You can undo most things." "But you can't undo that." I stood there for a long time. "So what does she need." "If you want to support her gut, look for something that does more than add a random probiotic." "And what would that be?" "A combination of a prebiotic, probiotic and postbiotic." She nodded back at her own shelf. "A prebiotic helps feed beneficial bacteria. A probiotic adds beneficial microorganisms. And a postbiotic provides beneficial compounds produced by bacteria." "Most products only give you one piece. And most of them are made for adults dealing with bloating, gas or regularity." "Look for specific, studied ingredients and a company that repeatedly tests the finished product for potency and purity." Then she took one of her business cards, turned it over, and wrote three things on the back. Livaux® prebiotic. SNZ 1969® probiotic. FloraSMART® postbiotic. "If it hasn't got all three, it isn't the same formula." I asked her which one to get. "I can't tell you what to buy. That's not my job." Then she stopped. "But my sister put her son on one about eight months ago. Same thing. The Tretinoin, the antibiotics, all of it." She wrote a name under the three things. First Day Teen's Gut Sustainer. "It's a teen-specific tribiotic gummy with all three. And I looked it up myself, because I didn't believe her when she told me." She slid the card across the counter with the bag. "You asked me a question, and somebody should have answered it two years ago." I ordered it in the car before we even pulled out of the parking lot. She'd said supporting the microbiome takes consistency, so I got the three month supply. I didn't cancel anything. The booklet was still in my purse and she was still starting in March. I was just going to use the thirty days I had to sit through anyway. It came four days later. I brought it up to her room. "Two of these a day. Don't skip." She looked at the bottle. Didn't argue. Didn't ask what it was. She was too tired to fight me about anything at that point. Week one, nothing. I didn't expect anything. Week two, nothing. And I remember checking the calendar that Sunday and thinking, well. Twenty days. Around week three I noticed the red ones on her chin didn't look as angry. I didn't say anything to her. I didn't want to jinx it. Week four, no new deep ones. First time in months. That was the week I was supposed to call and book the second appointment. I didn't call. I didn't cancel either. I just didn't pick up the phone, and I didn't tell my husband I hadn't, and I sat with that for about three days. Week six, she came down for breakfast without her hair pulled over her face. Week eight, she asked if her friend could come over that weekend. She hadn't asked me that in almost a year. March came and went. The thirty days ran out on their own, and the iPLEDGE window closed, and nobody from that office ever called me about it. By week twelve her skin was clear. Not better. Not manageable. Clear. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you it was a miracle. It wasn't overnight and it wasn't magic. She's still fifteen. She still gets one before a big week. And the scars from the picking are still there, and some of those aren't going anywhere. There were days she didn't want to swallow anything either. She'd open them into water instead, and it made no difference at all. I checked. But she stood in front of the mirror one morning and she didn't look away from it. She just stood there for a second, like she was looking at somebody she hadn't seen in a while. She's still on it. Two a day, every day, and she doesn't think about it anymore. It's just a thing that sits on the counter. It's been eight months now. And the thing I keep coming back to is how close I came to never knowing any of this. If that woman had been off that day, I'd have taken my bag and gone home, and my daughter would be four months into that drug right now. And I'd have gone the rest of my life thinking that was the only thing left. Somebody was covering a shift. That's it. That's the whole difference. And look, I'm not telling anyone not to do the Accutane. If it's the right call for your kid, it's the right call. I'm not a doctor. I'd just do this first. Because you've got thirty days before they'll even give it to her anyway. The appointment's not going anywhere. Neither is the drug. You may as well use them. And if you do look into it, don't take my word for it. Don't take the label's word either. Here's what she wrote on the back of that card, and it's all you need. Livaux® prebiotic, 250 mg. It supports gut health, regular digestion and a healthy microbiome. SNZ 1969® probiotic, 50 mg. It supports digestion, immunity and oral health. FloraSMART® postbiotic, 15 mg. It supports digestion, healthy skin and the relief of dry skin. And repeatedly tested for potency and purity. If it hasn't got all three, don't bother. That's not me. That's a pharmacist telling me not to buy anything off her own shelf. You'll know inside a few weeks. No new deep ones is the first thing. Then her hair comes off her face at breakfast. Then she asks if somebody can come over. Anyway. That's what worked for us. I spent two years reading about my daughter's skin and nobody ever said a word to me about her gut. So I'm saying it. EDIT: For everyone messaging me about what she wrote down, it's from the brand "First Day," and no, I didn't get it from the pharmacy or Amazon. Instead of messaging everyone back individually, I just linked it below 🙂 P.S. It doesn't hold steady while you think about it. Every month she's in there fighting on her own, they take a little more room and get a little harder to move. And the drug at the end of it doesn't touch what put her there, which is why so many of them are back doing a second round a year later. You've got the thirty days anyway. Use them.