Chronic Illness Can Teach You Patience (if you let it)
How my chronic illness, and ultimately Mercury poisoning, has taught me the valuable lesson of patience.
I’ve started meeting with a group of individuals who, like me, have Mercury poisoning over Zoom each week. We are unique in our own ways, but are able to express shared experiences that can feel impossible to explain to others in a way they’ll understand.
Like when I would tell someone, “I’ve completely lost all short-term and working memory, I finish reading one word and have completely forgotten it by the time I read the second word.” And they nod their head before replying, “Sometimes I have a hard time remembering names!”
They’re not the same thing, I’m afraid.
That isn’t a criticism against their intentions, only an observation of the limitations of shared experiences between us. When empathy is not possible, sympathy becomes an unfinished bridge between two worlds.
It’s been a long time coming.
I’ve been dealing with strange health issues most of my life. Between ages 9 and 10, I came down with Strep Throat and Scarlet Fever every month until they removed my tonsils. I can still taste the pink bubblegum-flavored Penicillin.
In my early teens I developed daily panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and experienced cataplexy episodes that no doctor could understand.
Late teens and throughout my twenties is when my food intolerances grew and grew, and grew. I would occasionally have an outbreak of rash and hives all over my face and chest, but it was still spontaneous enough we couldn’t figure out a trigger.
Into my thirties, the food intolerances only got worse and I couldn’t seem to find consistent safe foods to navigate. Every day I woke up with my eyes swollen shut to some degree and would spend the day icing them down as much as possible, only to wake up and repeat it the next day. Rashes and hives became more common.
That was also the period when I got hit with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Every manufactured product in my house seemed to be making me sick. I wrapped the mattress in 6mil plastic wrap to contain any off gassing from the foams and flame retardants (it’s not as fun as it sounds!).
I had to vet every single item coming into the house. No dryer sheets, everything had to be free of fragrances and dyes, and VOCs.
At 35 I thought I’d found a miracle in the Carnivore Diet. Within 3 days I felt better than I had in decades. But I didn’t realize going cold-turkey on Oxalates in your diet can trigger Histamine intolerance, and I got it big time.
Most other issues with my health seemed to be improving though, so I wasn’t completely unhappy with the trade-off.
Mercury poisoning was the tipping point.
And then in 2022, I started noticing strange things.
I lost my period, and I was hungry all the time. So I ate, and ate, and ate and gained some weight.
Then I was really tired, which seemed odd. I was always a bottle of energy!
I was getting worried by the time my hair started falling out by the handful, but I wasn’t really sure what to do. Ran lab tests with my doctor and they didn’t see anything unusual.
I’d have episodes where I couldn’t breath, called “air hunger,” and they became more frequent an intense. My doctor ordered a bronchoscopy to investigate and it produced nothing diagnostic.
Before long, I had extreme episodes of tachycardia, my heart beating out of my chest at more than 200bpm. Sweat pouring out of me, convinced I was going to die. A week-long Holter monitor showed no abnormalities.
Eventually, I was too tired to go on my usual morning walks. I’d turn around early and have to take a nap for a few hours to recover.
Weird episodes of reactive hyperglycemia in the middle of the night, and reactive hypoglycemia during the day had me all out of sorts on how to eat. I was already eating low-carb on Carnivore diet consistently and had no history of diabetes or insulin resistance.
And then I started losing my memory.
I won’t expand too much on that right now, it’s still the most tender part of the experience for me. It was as near to dementia as I can imagine being.
I’d forget where I was and how I got there. I’d forget a conversation mid-sentence, then forget who the person was talking to me. Most days I couldn’t read, because I couldn’t remember two words in a row.
Chronic dehydration, intolerance to heat and cold meant I was in and out of urgent care for IV fluids.
By December, everything in my body hurt. I had constant cramping in all of my muscles, and it felt like I had arthritis in every joint.
Small answers to prayers.
I reached out to an anti-aging telemedicine group by chance, and they flagged me as having zero Testosterone on my hormone labs. My missing period was still problematic but most doctors just dismissed it, “probably early menopause.”
I started Testosterone shots, and immediately resolved the joint pains. I still had cramping but it wasn’t quite as severe.
Still waiting on more medical appointments to chase down answers, investigate possible auto-immune. When those finally came, the doctors harassed me about taking Testosterone and threatened that they wouldn’t run any labs for six-months after I stopped with the injections. I refused.
So I reached out to a Functional Medicine Doctor, and operating off of post it notes to keep tabs on what I’d been able to piece together about what was happening to me, explained my concerns. It took several weeks to finish getting samples into the labs and wait on results.
And there it was, one of the labs was for heavy metals — positive for high levels of Mercury.
All of a sudden it made sense —
My mom had a mouth full of Mercury amalgam fillings when she was pregnant with me, and Mercury is passed through the placenta in vitro, so I would have been born with some.
I started getting my own Mercury amalgam dental fillings around 8 and 9 years of age, and it continued into my early teens.
Almost 30 years later, I still had my original Mercury amalgam dental fillings. They are not considered permanent fixtures (have a max life of 10 years), and metal is known to shrink and expand with heat/cold exposure and pressure. All of those activities increase the amount of vapor that is released and breathed into your lungs.
I’d spent the last year and a half consuming significant amounts of Swordfish and Tuna because it was cheap and tasted good. This was the nail in the coffin, and would explain why my blood labs showed active Mercury exposure which is VERY rare even if you are very toxic with heavy metals.
Bonus: I had silicone breast implants for more than a decade, and when researching them further, turns out a significant portion of the ingredients that make up implants are a variety of heavy metals. You do not need a rupture for the heavy metals and other toxic ingredients in breast implants to leech into your body constantly after implantation — a fact surfaced in 2011 in documents provided to Congress by implant manufacturers.
Okay, problem solved, right?
I’m very lucky I was able to identify Mercury poisoning so quickly. Many people will never in their lifetime come to that conclusion and continue suffering with no answers or hope.
But fixing heavy metal toxicity isn’t fast. It’s one hell of a marathon project.
Fist, I had to get my Mercury amalgam fillings replaced. That took a few months and a trip to Tijuana.
I was able to do some chelation using DMPS for about 6 months after replacing my fillings. But attempts to chelate with ALA (which is able to cross the blood-brain-barrier to remove Mercury from your grey matter) would trigger episodes of psychosis.
Again, it sounds way more fun than it is. I’m not certain how I managed to avoid padded walls during that period of time, but here we are.
So it was time for the breast implants to come out. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that these were harmful, despite it seeming so obvious. Women are really well trained to believe they are inert and innocuous, and despite my obsession with health and healing, it took real effort to break that programming.
I was able to explant in March 2025, and I spent the rest of last year focusing on just recovering from major surgery. Full rest from chelation (you shouldn’t chelate when you have any source of heavy metals still in your body) attempts.
We’re already almost 4 years into the process from when my major downward spiral began in 2022. But, we’re also 31 years into the process from when my random health issues started as a child.
I’ve really only ever known life through the filter of having to make concessions for my health. What a strange thing it will be to arrive on the other side, I’ll have so much time to accomplish whatever my imagination can come up with!
I’m sitting in my living room right now, typing. I have hundreds of supplement bottles stacked up on my table that I’m sorting into individual supplement packs I can grab-and-go each day.
I take specific supplements 6 different times each day, and I’m making a full year’s worth of each in advance. I’m not yet through a full year of a single supplement pack.
I’m prepping this so I can spend the year focused on navigating chelation without interruptions. I trialed two rounds of chelation in January that went well enough for me to know this is the next right step.
It’s very likely I have a good deal of Lead poisoning as well, based on my symptoms and childhood environment. I can chelate for both at the same time, following slightly different schedules, thankfully.
It won’t take me a year to chelate and be done. Best guess, I’m facing a decade of chelation. Maybe longer. Hopefully (and there’s a good chance) I’ll see major improvements long before then.
What is your 10-year life plan?
That’s a serious question, I’d love to hear in the comments. Let me live vicariously through you in small ways.
In the last Mercury group Zoom call, we talked about the lessons learned in this process for each of us. I joked, “I guess this was the Universe’s approach to teaching me patience, that I couldn’t have learned in an easier way.”
It’s good to keep a sense of humor in this all. It’s good to find the positives any way you can.
I’ve already recovered a great deal:
No more tachycardia
No air hunger / breathing issues
Rare for me to experience POTS episodes anymore, when I do they are very minor
Hair has stopped falling out
Period returned and hormones normalized!
No muscle or joint pain
No cramping
No chronic dehydration
Heat tolerance has returned, no heat exhaustion in 70F weather!
Body temp regulation returned, no longer freezing cold in 60F weather!
Increased tolerance for a variety of foods
MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) has improved dramatically, minor exposure no longer causes major illness for weeks
Regained short term and working memory!
No more insomnia
No more derealization
I’m excited to see how things continue to change and improve over time. I know chelation will not be an easy journey — moving Mercury around your system causes physical damage to your organs. But I’ve learned the only way out is through.