Mercury, Lead, and Candida--My Health Nightmare & Recovery
Although I have posted bits and pieces of my story here on CureZone over the past year, I figured I will post the entire thing up here for posterity for the sake of those in the future who might be searching for answers on Google for the same symptoms I dealt with.
THE BEGINNING
I was always a pretty strong, resilient kid health-wise. My health remained excellent for the first 25 years of my life, despite a terrible diet, alcohol, and other bodily abuses. I had no pain, plenty of energy, and a very clear and sharp mind.
When I was in my late 20s, I began to notice that my bowel movements were suddenly getting very loose and uncomfortable, like I would never feel 'done' and would have to wipe a hundred times after every BM, which was strange because my BMs for all my life before that were always very healthy, despite my terrible diet.
After about a year of poor BMs, I began to see other symptoms as well. Specifically, I started becoming very impatient with people and irritable in general. My social skills became shaky. I began having all sorts of spontaneous, crazy, inappropriate thoughts, like the most inappropriate things you could think of at any given time. (which I later learned was a sign of OCD). My attention span dropped to nothing. I developed other OCD behaviors as well, such as doing the same small routine over and over again while at home.
THE DOWNWARD SLIDE
As luck would have it, right when things started getting bad, I began law school. My first semester there, I realized that I had trouble concentrating on my studies--more trouble than I had ever noticed before. I simply chalked it up to 'getting old' and having been out of school for a few years.
During that first year, I developed chronic sinus problems, and prostate/urinary tract infections as well. Of course I went to the doctor, who tested me for STDs and told me that I was 100% clear of any. He told me this like as though it was good news, but of course it only made me feel worse, because now I had no answer for what was causing the stinging in my urinary tract. For my sinuses, he told me that it was a result of my having been a smoker for years, and that the cilia in my sinuses were damaged and needed time to regrow. Anyway, throughout my first year of law school, I had 3 or 4 severe sinus infections, with huge amounts of green and yellow mucous. I took
Antibiotics to clear up most of those.
After my first year of law school, the stress of the curriculum began to take its toll on me. I reached a point where I literally felt like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was the summer after that first year of law school that I began having severe upper back pain, between my shoulder blades. It got to the point where I could no longer wear hard-soled shoes because every time my heel made contact with the pavement, it made my upper back hurt terribly. I chalked the back pain up to a weightlifting injury from years ago.
That same summer my urinary tract and prostate trouble exploded. I developed a urinary tract infection that was so painful, the only way I could describe how it felt was as though someone threw gasoline on my privates followed by a lit match. I ran back to the doctor who seemed confused. He told me "men don't get UTIs," and just prescribed me some heavy-hitting full spectrum antibiotic. With the
Antibiotic the UTI pain went away, very slowly.
I began my second year of law school. My back pain continued, and my other joints began to become sore and painful as well, especially my elbows. It was as though I had tendonitis all the time. If I rested my elbows on a hard desk, they would begin hurting. Again, I just chalked this up to an old weightlifting injury.
That winter, my then-girlfriend pointed out that the hair on the crown of my head was rapidly balding. In fact, it was practically gone! Although the men on my mother's side of the family did have some hair loss, none of them were totally bald, and definitely not bald in their 20s. Also at that time I developed ANOTHER UTI. Things were getting rapidly worse.
I saw a specialist about my chronic UTIs. He gave me the old dreaded 'prostate exam,' and told me that my prostate was enlarged, and that I had a mild case of prostatitis. He then prescribed me some more heavy hitting
Antibiotics . This time, however, I was beginning to become suspicious of all the
Antibiotics I had been taking. I started to research frantically on the net and discovered a supplement called d-mannose. By the grace of God d-mannose completely cleared up my UTIs. Unfortunately, however, everything else was about to get much, much worse.
As I began my last year of law school, I came down with an excruciating case of strep throat. The pain was unbearable. Again I ran to the doctor and got more antibiotics. During my last year of law school, my back pain continued to increase. I began wearing a back brace to school, under a sweatshirt.
In the middle of my last year of law school, I began noticing a strange redness on my face. It was centered on my nose and creeped out onto my cheeks like a mask. I asked my girlfriend if my face looked a bit more red than usual, but she said it looked totally normal. So I forgot about it.
I graduated law school (with mediocre grades thanks to my mental issues), and began to study for the bar. All of my other symptoms continued, but now it seemed that my body's 'infrastructure' was falling apart. Any time I engaged in some sort of challenging physical activity I injured myself--specifically, my tendons and ligaments. The tendons in my fingers began to hurt just from carrying bags of groceries up the stairs. Then, I suddenly developed a sharp pain in my groin/scrotum area. It felt like someone stabbed me with a dagger there. It was only much later that I learned that I had developed a large varicocele (enlarged/varicose vein in the scrotum).
Also while studying for the bar, the rosacea redness on my face increased and actually began stinging a bit. I went to a dermatologist and paid almost $3k out of pocket for VBeam laser treatment on my face in the hopes that it would clear up the redness once and for all. It worked for a few weeks, after which the redness creeped back. That was $3k wasted.
At this point it (finally) began dawning on me that something was holistically wrong with me. But I had no idea where to begin looking for an answer. I started drinking apple cider vinegar with honey 3x a day. That made me feel a little better. So I thought, 'Great, I'm on the way back to health.' I couldn't have been any more wrong.
THE FLOOR DROPS OUT
The September after law school, with 'perfect' timing, I began working at my first law job. By this time the pain in my groin had become an everyday thing. My thoracic back pain had reached unbearable intensity. The redness on my face went from mild stinging to feeling like someone had thrown acid on my face. I remember sitting trying to pay attention through a conference call feeling like a million ants were eating my face. It was literally like a waking nightmare.
From there all hell broke loose. I was in pain from head to toe, all day every day--full-blown fibromyalgia. My eyesight became extremely blurry. My short-term memory and concentration was non-existent. People at work questioned why I had trouble remembering things I had been told minutes earlier. "You're too young to be forgetting things so quickly," they told me.
Although I was in terrible pain from head to toe, the most urgent matter for me was to try to get rid of my rosacea. The stinging redness on my face hurt so bad that it was near-impossible to concentrate on anything at work. I started searching the net for answers.
I found posts online from people claiming that natural remedies had helped their rosacea. I began trying tons of them. I spent hundreds of dollars on different supplements, creams, etc. Some of them worked somewhat (specifically baking soda and peroxide), but no cures. The cure FINALLY came when I applied apple cider vinegar to my face, straight with a cotton ball. Holy Moley did it burn! IMMEDIATELY my entire face lit up like a Christmas tree, and then the redness gradually went down. For the next week, ALL of the skin on my face peeled off. Whatever fungus was causing my rosacea, the ACV had burned it off like
Turpentine burns off paint. So great, I had found the answer to the rosacea. But I still had tons of other problems to deal with. My entire body was swollen and inflammed, from head to toe.
I found the website EarthClinic and started taking "Ted's alkalizing remedy" of lime juice and baking soda, to alkalize my system. This gave me huge candida/toxin die off, to the point where my kidneys hurt. This clued me in to the fact that I may have some sort of parasite/fungus problem. So I began looking for remedies that would help. I also learned about the anti-candida diet, and started that, as well as began taking tons of every antifungal I could get my hands on. Some days the die off was so bad that I had to almost drag myself home from work at night.
My sinuses had become completely clogged, and I was blowing my nose constantly. I scorched the heck out of them by putting things like ACV, baking soda, etc., in my neti pot. Eventually I bought one of those electric sinus irrigation systems. While using it for the first time at maximum power, I had a gelatinous brown glob of something the size of a golf ball come out of my sinuses. I felt like things just couldn't get any worse at that point.
During all this time, the pain in my groin was becoming worse and worse. I had been rubbing
Colloidal Silver and DMSO on my groin, which reduced the pain a little, but I was afraid to drink the silver because of all the propaganda I saw online that said it would make me turn blue. Finally the groin pain got so bad that I broke down and started drinking the
Colloidal Silver , which immediately started reducing the pain. The fact that the pain had been getting worse and spreading up to my abdomen led me to believe that there had to be some sort of infection in there. So I decided to try a more drastic remedy to kill of whatever the infection was.
I bought some
Miracle-Mineral-Supplement and let it sit in my fridge for a month again, because I was nervous after having read so much negative propaganda about it online. But the groin pain started creeping back again and so I thought, the heck with it, I am going to try
Miracle-Mineral-Supplement . Immediately after the first dose of
Miracle-Mineral-Supplement , my urine became cloudy with white blood cells. Shortly after that, the groin pain was almost completely gone. MMS had done in one day what nothing else had been able to do. So I decided to stick with it for a while and see if it wouldn't improve some of my other symptoms as well.
As I continued upping the dose, I had all sorts of weird die-off reactions. The MMS confirmed my suspicions that I had blood parasites, because after a week of taking it, my feet swelled up as though my circulation was blocked. I realized that this had to be the result of all of the dead
parasites and other junk, killed off by MMS, suddenly floating around in my blood and my body trying to filter it all out. My feet swelled up to the point that all of my shoes became too small, and I developed all sorts of ingrown toenails as a result. This too was extremely painful.
But then came the grand show stopper for MMS. After being on it for a week, I passed WORMS with a bowel movement. 2-3 white worms, about 2
inches long each, floating there dead. After going through all the pain and suffering of the past few years, I honestly wasn't even surprised. At that point an alien could have come out of my stomach and I wouldn't have been shocked. But at least the worms were out of me, and I had MMS to thank for it.
FINALLY FIGURING IT OUT
Now that MMS had helped me regain some semblance of an immune system, I began trying to figure out what had started dragging my immunity down to begin with. I read tons of books about the acid/alkaline balance, candida, the Primal/Caveman diet, etc. It all made sense, but nothing I changed seemed to have any significant effect on my immunity. I still couldn't eat like I had before I got sick--going off the anti-candida diet made my symptoms come right back. I still felt like garbage in general.
How I eventually made the metal-candida connection was after researching tons and tons of personal testimonials online. I noticed a trend: the people that were trying to battle candida the 'conventional' way--i.e., through antifungals and dieting--had almost zero success. Many of them had been trying to get rid of candida for years. On the other hand, among the people who saw candida as a sign of possible metal toxicity and used chelation, there were quite a few success stories. Some of them reported almost complete recovery.
That's when the bell went off. I had 12 silver fillings in my mouth, many of which were quite large, and many of which were decades old. I also was fairly certain that I had lead in me, as I had recently discovered that my building's tap water (which I had been drinking most of my life) was full of lead. So I made an appointment to have my fillings removed so I could get started chelating.
As the holistic dentist removed my silver fillings by quartile, I felt better with each visit. The only way I could describe it is as though I no longer had a feeling like I was being mildly poisoned 24hrs a day. I did, however, feel noticeably more 'ADD' and even a little 'nuts' for a day or so after all the fillings were removed. I realized that this had to be a result of the mercury I had swallowed during the removal.
A few days after the fillings were gone, I started chelating with DMSA as per the Cutler protocol. Ever since then, my health has been on what I can only describe as a slow, steady incline. My back pain has improved immensely; my fibromyalgia and other muscle pain is gone and my tendons are feeling better every day. Unfortunately, I had to have the varicocele surgically repaired. But that seems to be healing nicely now too.
CLOSING
So there you have it. Now that I am finally feeling like I may regain some of the health I have lost, I often reflect in disbelief at what happened to me. Sure, it was better than being paralyzed or maimed, but compared to the average Joe walking the street, I encountered some pretty bad luck. I lost four of the prime years of my life to debilitating pain and massive brain fog. I lost most of my sense of smell. I wasted thousands of dollars trying to find answers. I also lost out on untold career opportunities because of the effect all of the pain and mental problems had on my law school grades. I think to myself, who can I blame? The American Dental Association? The FDA? Mainstream medicine? I often want to blame myself, but then, how could I have had any idea that my dental fillings and water were killing me? One of the simplest things I can do is post this online in the hopes that someone who is suffering as I suffered finds this in their research for an answer to their ailments. I only hope that they find their answers before they crash as I did.