The Best Laid Plans…

I love to plan. I’m the kind of person who draws up timelines of what I need to get done in the next 6 months, with mini-zoomed-in timelines for each of those months, with each month generating its own to-do list. In idle moments, I will conjure up the calendar year in my mind and mull over all of the wonderful things I’m going to achieve, and when.

You’d think that a big old project like a two-year-long mercury detox would have made me as happy as a pig in shit. You’d be wrong.

Oh yes, I drew up plenty of plans and outlines. I multiplied doses by rounds by days-on-round by weeks-in-the-year and came up with all kinds of timelined goals.

Mercury laughed.

It’s easy to plan out how many rounds you’re going to do in a year. But what happens if those rounds cause side effects that are unbearable?  Do you just skip a round and hope things will settle down? Decrease your dose? Quit?

When things got hard for me, I tried all of the above. And tried about ten different kinds of supportive supplements. And asked for advice on the Frequent Dose Chelation Yahoo Group. And disregarded that advice. And eventually followed it.

Believe me, my super-organized goal-setting brain could hardly bear the big old mess I was making of something as simple as fifty or so rounds of chelation. But the fact was, I was doing great.

Chelation looks simple from the outside: just take your doses at frequent intervals every weekend for a couple of years. But for some of us, life and symptoms get in the way, making it really really hard.

I’ve started to think of chelation as being something like a long road trip, say from Alaska to Florida.

In an unreliable car.

In January.

You have a good idea of where you want to point the car (southeast), you know the speed you want to go at (40mph, preferably following a snowplow). But you can’t predict the weather, you can’t tell in advance how long the whole trip will take.

It’s the same with chelation. You know you’re heading for sunnier times and better health. You know you have a lot of rounds to cover before you get there. How long will it take? Who knows?

Unexpected encounters with yeast or viral infections may leave you holed up in Nebraska for weeks, or driving in circles in Chicago.

It may be tempting to quit. To just give up half-way there.

Don’t.

Get out your map, fix your goal in your mind, and get back on the road. Talk to people who’ve made this journey before you. Let them remind you of the big picture when you can’t see more than six inches in front of your face.

Take care of your big old car, rest up when the blizzards strike. But don’t give up in Nebraska! Believe me, keep on going, and one of these days you’ll make it into the sunshine.