It’s Friday and I just left Urgent Care for dehydration. Admittedly, I should have gone in on Wednesday but I always want to just deal with things on my own if I can.
Every round of chelation is rough in one way or another. This one was especially tough on my muscles, I had severe cramping in my legs, back, and neck muscles. My legs are always the worst though; sometimes they’ll be so cramped up I can’t straighten them to walk normally.
I rarely go anywhere without electrolytes, but on chelation I get more nausea and it’s difficult to drink enough without making myself vomit from it.
I have excellent insurance, so the co-pay was only $50. There weren’t many people ahead of me and it only took ~ 3 hours to get in and out with a 1000mL IV saline drip.
But I’m also fortunate that I work a remote job and my boss is understanding of the health challenges I’m facing. Still, I checked work messages and emails the whole time from my phone despite her telling me, “don’t worry about checking in, go to Urgent Care!”
Yesterday I unboxed this month’s subscription to the myriad of supplements I need to take each day to support my liver, adrenals, and digestion while dealing with Mercury poisoning and the chelation process.
Even using Amazon’s Subscribe & Save program the price adds up.
Liver Support & Methylation:
- Gamma Oryzanol – $15
- Milk Thistle – $40
- Calcium Ascorbate (Vit C) – $10 (bulk powder, not including gelatin caps)
- B12 – $24
- B3 + Chromium Picolinate – $20
- B-Minus – $30
- Methylfolate – $23
- Folinic Acid – $13
- Omega 3 – $40
- Vitamin E – $42
- Molybdenum – $18
- Selenium – $36
- Zinc Bisglycinate – $9
- L-Glutamine – $20
- Glycine – $12
- Taurine – $16
- Choline – $20
Adrenal / Cortisol Support:
- Adrenal Cortex – $40 x 2
- Holy Basil – $15
- L-Theanine – $25
- Hydrocortisone Cream 1% – $varies
Sleep Support:
- 10-in-1 Herbal Sleep Support – $22
- L-Ornithine – $15
- Melatonin – $15
- Magnesium L-Threonate – $58
Hormone Support:
- DIM – $17
- Progesterone Cream – $24
Electrolytes:
- Magnesium Sulfate – $40
- ReMyte (electrolyte mix) – $40 x 4
- Magnesium Gel (topical) – $28
Digestion:
- Betaine HCl – $11
- Ox Bile – $41
- Digestive Enzymes – $40
- FODMATE – $65
- Stinging Nettle Extract – $23
- Ginger Chews (for nausea) – $10 x 2
Average monthly cost in supplements: $1051
Luckily, chelation medications are not expensive.
That’s just to give my body the best fighting chance at getting by at this phase in healing.
I’ll take handfuls of pills morning, noon, and night for the foreseeable future. The inside of my house is organized to make refilling my daily supplement containers convenient.
I was lucky enough to live close to the Mexico border, so I could easily travel outside of the states to have the dental work necessary to remove my Mercury amalgam fillings. In the US it would have run me $30k or more; I was able to get it done in Tijuana for $3500.
To even get diagnosed with Mercury poisoning? Despite my excellent health insurance I’d invested 5-figures to traditional medicine before paying out of pocket cash to a Functional Medicine doctor and the expensive labs he ran.
I think about this a lot when I evaluate people living on the streets or in their cars. When I see people lined up at the pharmacy picking up prescription medications that don’t actually address the core problem but just put a band-aid over the symptoms.
It’s too expensive for most people to pursue healing.
By some strange stroke of luck I ended up moving into an Ambulance before I got so severely sick. Before this I owned a house in Seattle; I would have never been able to afford the cost of healing on top of that mortgage payment.
Beyond Money
Even more than the financial toll, being chronically sick costs you in so many areas of life.
I think about the years asked to be demoted at work because I couldn’t manage proper career goals while being so sick.
Or the relationships I had to let go of or not even entertain because I was too physically and mentally exhausted.
The trips I never took because the risk of eating any number of “normal” foods that mess me up is too great.
The activities I didn’t participate in because I had to rest and sleep, I couldn’t breath, my brain wouldn’t work, it’s in the sun and I’m already dehydrated, yadda yadda yadda.
I was supposed to go to Cancun for work in May. By the time I calculated the stress of travel (12+ hours in airport/planes each way), the unknown food situation, and the reality of packing 7 days’ worth of supplements and prescription drugs I needed two naps. “Maybe next year 🤞,” I tell my boss.
I was talking with my girlfriend Jen the other day; she’s battled her own health issues in life and we just get each other on that level. I need my brain to be working again, and then some.
“I’m thinking about ordering some drugs from Russia that are supposed to help your brain,” I told her.
She was nothing but encouraging. “It’s time, you gotta get your brain back.”
They’ll only set me back a few hundred dollars, a drop in the bucket. The bigger personal challenge is dealing with a month of intra-muscular injections. They’re supposed to be gold standard for helping people recover from stroke, TBIs, and similar.
“Can you believe that in all of this I had a genius-level IQ, before the worst of the Mercury made me utterly stupid? If I’d never had to be sick think of all the things I could have accomplished in this life.”
It makes me angrier than anything else ever has.
I feel the cost has been my life, even though I’m still alive.
Maybe consider that when you see people not reaching higher. Maybe there’s an invisible lead weight holding them down, fucking them up in the head, turning their reality into nonsense.
Mercury poisoning probably isn’t as uncommon as it seems.
