Round 5 introduced my first strength increase since starting the Cutler protocol. I successfully titrated up to 18.75 mg—up from 12.5 mg—without issue. Here is the round in numbers:

Unlike the previous round, I felt my best on day two, and started feeling worse on day three. My first day off round was also uncomfortable—worse than normal—but by Friday I started feeling like my old, broken self again.

What I have gathered from this round is that 18.75 mg is my new baseline. If all goes well, I will again increase my strength—this time to 25 mg—starting with round nine. I would love to be well into my ALA rounds, but I am still seven rounds away. No reason to mess things up, so I stay on course and wait…patiently.

Continuing the competition, I timed my Sunday night ritual tonight to see how it compared to last week’s time; my personal best. Here are last week’s numbers:

And here are the new numbers from tonight’s exercise:

Amazingly enough, my overall time hasn’t budged a bit since last week. I did manage to save a minute when preparing my supplements, only to lose it when I created my DMSA capsules. I am surprised that it only took me a minute longer to create the DMSA capsules when compared to last week; after all this is my first time creating 18.75 mg capsules and I created 20 instead of 18.

Now comes the fun part: taking 18.75 mg doses this round in place of 25 mg. I’ll find out soon enough how I fair with the increase. If everything goes fine, you’ll hear about it Wednesday night at the earliest.

In my round 4 wrap-up, I announced that round 5 would be my first experiment at increasing the DMSA strength. Rather than create 18.75 mg capsules, I instead decided to keep the strength at 12.5 mg and increase my doses from every four-hours to every three-hours. This would result in a 1.33x increase in quantity consumed per round. Not quite 1.5x but it was an increase.

After some thinking, I realized it would be easier to simply increase the strength, keeping the interval between doses the same as it has been since I started. I will actually create less new capsules and continue only having to remember to take a dose every four-hours.

As outlined in “A Stopwatch and My Sunday Night Ritual”, I currently pour half of the 25 mg capsule’s content into a new capsule, leaving the remaining DMSA in it’s original capsule. This allows me to only have to create nine new capsules, with the remaining nine coming from the original 25 mg capsule. Pretty easy.

Here is how I am going to create the 18.75 mg capsules:

1. Load new capsule into tray
2. Empty 25% of a 25 mg DMSA capsule into the new capsule
3. Close existing capsule with 75% remaining DMSA content (finished 18.75 mg capsule)
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until new capsule has had 25% of three 25 mg DMSA capsules emptied into it
5. Close new capsule (finished 18.75 mg capsule)
6. Repeat, starting with step one until at least 18 capsules have been created

With this method, every three existing 25 mg capsules will create four 18.75 mg capsules. Because of this, the preparation exercise outlined above will end up creating 20 capsules per round, instead of 18. This will allow me to also increase my round length by two-doses.