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Another year passed and I was saying hello to 2014, which also meant more bloodwork for me to do.  I had to have a nurse come to the house to draw my blood since this was something that Kaiser would never do.  She took around 8 vials of blood from me!  It was going to take a few weeks until I got the results, so I had to wait patiently.

A New Year, to me, meant that it was time to get things started, start off on a good foot, so I decided to switch dentists and go to one that was closer to my house.  The office was pretty nice and the staff was filled with young women who seemed eager and passionate about their work.  I hadn’t gone to the dentist every 6 months like I was supposed to, so I was anticipating bad news.  The dentist was telling me how my gums weren’t in great shape because some were receding more than others.  She also mentioned that I had a cracked filling and that I would need to get it replaced.  No big deal, right?  Those were all normal things that I would’ve expected to hear when you visit the dentist, so I thought nothing of it at all.  They went ahead and continued to do my cleaning, I scheduled my next appointment and went home.

I was preparing all week for my son’s 7th birthday and I was exhausted.  On the day of his party, I started to have this really weird feeling in my brain.  Not my head, but my brain.  I know, weird right?  You know how your eye twitches sometimes, well, that’s how it felt in my brain.  It wasn’t painful and it didn’t hinder me from doing the things that I needed to do but it was annoying.  It became so annoying that I eventually got a headache.  My son’s party started, he had a great time and it was great.  I wasn’t really myself but I pushed through it because I had to.  When the party ended and my husband and I were watching TV, we were discussing how I should go to good ol’ Kaiser to get checked out if it didn’t go away by the next day.  I wanted to take an advil so bad so that I could feel normal and not be so annoyed anymore but I didn’t want to give in since I was really making an effort to not take any type of drugs or medications anymore.  I decided to hop on my lap top to see if I could find anything on “brain twitching” and low and behold I started to see posts on amalgam/silver fillings and how they can affect the brain and sometimes cause brain twitching and neurological issues.  Once I saw that, I went ahead and emailed my holistic doctor to see what he would say.  I mentioned how I had seen a dentist a few days before, my symptoms and how I stumbled across some information on the internet about silver fillings.  Within a few hours, I received an email from him saying that he was very concerned about the cracked fillings and that I needed to do a heavy metals test as soon as possible.  He also sent me a you tube link showing me the negative effects of having amalgam fillings, along with www.IAOMT.org to find a holistic dentist who would properly remove my amalgam fillings.  I immediately watched the youtube video and it showed how anytime you ate hot or cold things, brushed your teeth, got your teeth cleaned, basically anything that made contact with your teeth, caused invisible vapors to emanate from the filling and seep into your organs and stick to them.  In this case, the brain.  Hence, the neurological issues it causes.  I was mortified.  Why would dentists even bother putting this stuff in our mouths if that was the case?!  And what did my doctor mean, “properly” remove the fillings.  There was a “proper” way to remove silver fillings?  I kind of panicked because I’ve had silver fillings all my life.  For as long as I could remember.  So if I was being exposed to these invisible vapors, my brain must be melted right?  Next I went to the website he forwarded to me and I searched for a holistic dentist in my area.  Thank goodness there were two in my area, the rest were super far, so I scheduled an appointment within the next few days.  Meanwhile, I awaited my heavy metals test that was being shipped to me.

After receiving my holistic doctor’s email, I went ahead and called Kaiser the next day and was able to schedule a phone appointment because I was curious to see what they were going to say.  Plus I felt that I should explore all options.  The nurse over the phone was telling me that he thought it was a tension headache.  I explained to him that my head didn’t hurt, but that my brain was twitching.  I had no head trauma, my neck didn’t hurt, nor was it stiff but he insisted it was a tension headache and that I take some advil.  We went ahead and scheduled an appointment with my new doctor for a few days later just in case the “tension headache” didn’t go away.  I did, however, give in to taking ibuprofen.  I tried so hard not to take any but I felt like I couldn’t function properly without taking it.  The twitching would go away but right when it would hit 4 hours, the twitching came back.  Since the twitching didn’t stop,  I kept my appointment with my D.O. at Kaiser to see what would come out of it.  He asked the same questions that the nurse asked over the phone and I gave him the same answers.  His diagnosis: I sprained my scalp.  What the?!  Ummm….okay.  I asked how it was possible that I sprained my scalp if I hadn’t had any brain trauma and he gave me some lame reason of how sometimes we turn our head a certain way and how there’s connective tissue and veins that run throughout our scalp and perhaps I turned a certain way and agitated it.  I laughed in my head while he was explaining all this and asked myself why I even bothered ever going back to that place.

The next day I had my appointment with my new found holistic dentist.  She went on to explain pretty much the same thing that the other dentist had told me.  I had a cracked filling and my gums were receding in certain areas more than others.  But she also went on to explain to me how dangerous silver fillings were and why she decided to get training and more education on how to remove them.  I hadn’t realized that not only were the patients victims of exposure to the amalgam, but so were the dentists because they were the one’s handling it all the time.  It ended up that I had about 5 teeth that had anywhere from 2-4 fillings on each.  Sheezus!  I couldn’t even imagine how badly my exposure was but I was still waiting for my results to come back in.  So I had an appointment for the following week to start getting all my fillings replaced.  It was going to take at least 3 appointments to get all of them done because lucky me, I had to have a crown replaced as well.

I finally received my bloodwork back that I had taken a few weeks before and surprise, surprise, there  were MORE things that showed up in my labs.  Apparently I had the mono virus running active in my body and I guess that meant I had mono at some point in my life and I didn’t even know it.  My doctor was surprised and had me try to think back to a time in my life when I was really sick.  And I remembered.  It was when I was 19.  I was in college and it was the first time I got bronchitis and I was really sick.  It took me about a month and a half to get better from that episode.  I had bronchitis, sinusitis, a double ear infection and bruised ribs from coughing so much.  At least that’s what the doctor said at the school clinic.  My doctor said that I probably had mono but was misdiagnosed and wasn’t treated properly.  I did remember the doctor at the school clinic telling me she couldn’t understand why I was so sick.  She prescribed me antibiotics and looking back, that’s kind of when all my issues started.  That was the year that I even started experiencing seasonal allergies.  Okay, so active mono virus, what next?  He said that I also had a walking pneumonia virus active in my body as well.  I had walking pneumonia back in 2012 for the first time.  I didn’t understand what he meant by active viruses, so he went on to explain that the viruses were never really fully “turned off”.  That my immune system has continued trying to fight them off and wasn’t successful.  Then he asked if I had ever been bitten by a tick.  My heart dropped…lyme disease?  Luckily, he said I didn’t have lyme disease but I did test positive for the bacteria.  Maybe the tick didn’t latch on long enough to cause the disease but long enough to leave bacteria in my blood.  For the love of God, was he serious?  I kept thinking to myself, was this it?  Would this finally be it?  My doctor praised me for being such a fighter and looking back to when I first came to him, I was a truly sick person.  He had hoped that by peeling back a few layers of stuff, he’d find what was wrong with me, but in my case, he had to keep peeling and peeling, only to find out more.  He had truly felt that maybe these active viruses were what was driving my autoimmune disease.  So you know what that meant…more pills!  Grrrreat!  But hey, whatever it took to get me better, I was willing to do it.

Just when I was just getting used to the news of my active viruses and tick bacteria, my heavy metals test results came back.  In a way, I was hoping for them to come back high because I felt like I needed more confirmation for all the things that I was going through.  I guess my prayers were answered because my levels for mercury were in the red zone.  It was official, I had mercury toxicity.  I couldn’t believe it, but at the same time, I wasn’t surprised either.  So I had to go through a heavy  metals detox, which meant I was going to be taking like 50 something pills a day altogether.  I ended up experiencing some side effects, which I expected, but it was nothing serious.  I just felt extremely tired throughout the day and I required naps sometimes.  Now all I had to anticipate for was the removal of my amalgam fillings.

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