The Worst Thing About Mercury Poisoning

I love to read. And of course my favorite genre is the medical memoir. Give me a story about someone who overcomes an obscure and hideous condition like Ewing’s sarcoma or losing part of their brain in an accident, and I’m hooked. I love these stories because I’m an overcomer too.

The hideous condition I overcame was mercury poisoning. It was caused by the amalgam fillings in my teeth. Not a lot of people know that dental fillings can cause mercury poisoning in certain sensitive individuals. I certainly didn’t know it when I got my fillings placed as a teenager, and I only had a vague inkling of it when I had those fillings removed in my 30s. It was only in the year following amalgam removal, when my health started to circle the drain, that I learned exactly how much havoc amalgam fillings can cause.

In the larger scheme of things, I count myself as one of the lucky victims of mercury poisoning.  My symptoms started to get bad, and only a few months later I found the frequent dose chelation protocol that slowly brought about my full recovery. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t quick, but I found it when I needed it, and it worked.

If you’ve lived through it, you know how awful mercury poisoning can be, awful in more ways than I can possibly list in one post. (In fact, I think I’ll write a series of posts titled “the worst thing…”) But today, looking back at this whole experience, the worst thing about it was this:

Most people don’t know anything about mercury poisoning.

What this meant for me in my everyday life was that I was terribly sick, but didn’t have an easily-recognizable label to present to people to explain my condition. It would have been a lot easier if I could say “I have cancer” or “I have diabetes.” These are labels that people can work with. “I have mercury poisoning” is a statement that means nothing to most people and needs a lot of follow-up explanation, or worse, they hear it and it conjures up images of fringey hypochondria.

As one of my girlfriend’s friends bluntly put it when presented with the news that I had to break another dinner engagement because I wasn’t well:

“Yeah, I know. Your girlfriend can’t make it because she’s a freak.”

Being so sick was terrible, but the isolation of being that “freak” with mercury poisoning made it so much worse. There was technical information out there, good information that showed me how to beat mercury and get better, but that was only part of what I needed. I needed to connect with people who had come out the other side of what I was going through. I needed to go to a frequent dose chelation support group. I needed to read the four or five medical memoirs written by people who had gone through what I was facing. But of course those groups and memoirs did not exist, I was on my own.

And that’s what motivated me to create this blog. That’s why I’m writing a book about my experience of frequent dose chelation. I’ve made a full recovery from mercury poisoning, but I know that some of you reading this post are just starting out. I know what a godsend a blog like this would have been for me three years ago, and that’s why I’m offering it to you. While I work on that medical memoir about frequent dose chelation, I’ll drop in here and talk about whatever comes up as I work. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polished and processed. But I think it might be something that could help melt the isolation a little, and let you feel like less of a “freak”.