In 2009, I was in India when I caught dysentery.
I remember the fluorescent lights of the clinic more clearly than I remember most of that week. I remember being sick, exhausted, and thousands of miles from anyone who knew me. And I remember the questions.
Any vaccinations? Allergies? Pre-existing conditions? Anything we should know before we treat you?
I didn't have good answers. Not because I didn't know my own health — because I'd never had to hold all of it in my head at once, in a moment like that, in a country where nothing about my history existed on paper or in any system anyone there could reach. Back home, my file was somewhere. Here, I was just a sick stranger trying to remember details that suddenly mattered enormously and that I'd never once thought to memorise.
I got through it. But the feeling stayed with me longer than the illness did.
The pattern that never changed
Over the years that followed, I kept moving. Japan. South Africa. The US. Spain. Switzerland. France. Norway. Finland. Tunisia. Canada. Dubai. Qatar. Seventeen countries in total, by the time I stopped counting the way most people stop counting flights.
And every single time, the same problem showed up in a slightly different costume.
A paper slip folded into a jacket pocket, half-illegible after a wash I forgot to check the pockets for. A blood group card sitting in a drawer somewhere on a different continent from where I actually needed it. A doctor asking a question I technically knew the answer to, if only I'd had it in front of me instead of buried somewhere in memory, under stress, in a language that wasn't always my own.
None of it was ever a single catastrophic failure. It was smaller than that, and in some ways worse — a slow, repeating friction that followed me everywhere I went, showing up exactly when I could least afford it.
What actually breaks
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you start moving countries regularly: your health history doesn't move with you. Your passport does. Your visa does, eventually, painfully. But the record of your own body — what you're allergic to, what's worked before, what hasn't, what a doctor five years and three countries ago already figured out about you — usually just stays wherever you left it.
Every new doctor starts from zero. Every new country means re-explaining, re-translating, re-proving things you already know to be true about yourself. And in an emergency, "re-explaining" isn't a minor inconvenience. It's the exact moment where clarity matters most and is hardest to produce.
I don't think this is a rare experience. I think it's an almost universal one for anyone who actually lives an international life rather than just visiting it. I've since heard versions of my own story from people all over the world — a sinus infection in Lisbon, a chronic condition managed across three countries in four years, a family stuck for three weeks trying to track down a decade-old vaccination record for a visa application. Different details, same shape.
Why I built Syncura
I didn't set out to build a company. I set out to solve a problem I'd personally lived with for over fifteen years and quietly assumed I'd just have to keep living with.
Syncura is the answer to a simple question: what if your health history actually moved with you, the way the rest of your life does when you relocate? Not scattered across old clinics and forgotten drawers. Not dependent on your memory in a moment of crisis. One place — encrypted, portable, and controlled entirely by you — that holds everything a doctor anywhere might need to know, translated into their language, on your own device, the moment you need it.
Nothing shared remotely. Nothing sitting on someone else's server waiting to be accessed without you in the room. Just your own history, finally organised, finally with you, wherever "with you" happens to be next.
Starting from scratch, one more time
I think about that clinic in India more than most people would guess, given how long ago it was. Not because it was the worst moment of my travels — it wasn't, not by a long way — but because it was the first time I understood something that took me years to actually act on: moving countries shouldn't mean starting your health history from scratch, every single time, for the rest of your life.
I built Syncura so it doesn't have to.
If that story sounds familiar — if you've ever sat in a clinic somewhere far from home, trying to remember things you shouldn't have had to memorise — I'd genuinely like to hear about it. And if you want to try building your own portable health history before your next move, Syncura is there when you're ready.