Last week was a surprise, seeing as I came in with a whopping four-minute improvement. Last week’s numbers:

Not only was I unable to best last week’s time, but tonight’s exercise came in with an additional minute of work:

The extra minute shows up in supplements packing, which makes sense. I had to open three new bottle of supplements, which is more than I had to do last week (two, I believe).

At this point I am splitting hairs, but it’s something to make the process fun; a challenge I face each week while I patiently wait for the symptoms to start subsiding. Could I attribute it to OCD? Sure, but if that’s also linked to mercury poisoning then this exercise will hopefully fade away in the future, even while I am still chelating.

Sorry for the cheesy title, but it was the only way for me to get it out of my head. I am not a fan of Bon Jovi music, so getting it out of my head was of top priority. As for this round’s numbers:

I had a rough time on day two this round. Nausea induced by eyestrain became a major hurdle for me to overcome, where the only prescription was resting my eyes. My first day off round (yesterday) was also somewhat rough, but I mustered through and came out feeling no better nor worse than before I started the round.

I am very happy to know that I am halfway through my 12-DMSA-only-rounds. The experience has been almost effortless, and I can’t wait for the next six-rounds to fly by just the same.

Some of my earliest memories of expectations were centered around dates. Even though I did not like being the center of attention, I still did enjoy my birthdays. And who could forget the anticipation of waiting for Christmas morning? Later came the expectation of getting my learner’s permit on my 16^th birthday, ushering in a new age of independence and growth.

Back then, my expectations were centered around toys and new opportunities. Today I find my wishful thinking revolves not around taking my life to a whole new level, but rather getting my life back to where it once was. When your livelihood has been stolen from you, it is all but impossible to not strive to recapture it.

All throughout my journey to recovery, I have found myself resetting expectations. Each new medical appointment brought hope that I would finally discover what was wrong with me. Every new prescription again reset expectations, believing that this latest addition to my medicine cabinet would bring back normalcy. And while each reset did change my perspective, it also decreased my hope. You can only play this game for so long before the pessimist overpowers your thought process.

This is the reason why I have not established any expectations since I started chelating. What’s the point of only being let down once again? I still have an expectation that I will one day get better—it’s what has kept me going for the last two-years—but resetting my expectations around yet another treatment protocol? I don’t think so. I would much rather be surprised by my newfound regains in health than let down about another failed attempt.

Last week, like the week before, I came in with a total preparation time of 24 minutes. I figured I plateaued and would not see any significant gains moving forward. Last week’s numbers:

Tonight’s preparation exercise came in dramatically lower; four-minutes to be exact:

I am not exactly sure what wiped nearly 17% of my preparation time off, but I am not complaining. It appears the majority of savings came from preparing DMSA, but I am surprised to see a minute shaved off when packing supplements. This week I introduced another supplement—a probiotic—into the mix. If anything, I figured I would lose time, not save it.

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.

I am happy to announce that I have four rounds under my belt. Much like rounds one and three, I have followed the same schedule and strength combination:

What can I say? It went very smoothly. I did notice that I felt better on days two and three, and my worst yesterday — my first day off round.

I am thinking that round five is when I experiment with my first strength increase. Instead of moving my strength up to 18.75 mg (1.5x increase) I am instead going to change my schedule from every four-hours to every three-hours. The net result will be almost the same (16.67 mg), with the only change being that I need to create six more capsules using my same capsule splitting protocol.

In the spirit of competition, I decided to time myself (again) preparing my supplements and DMSA for the week ahead. Here are last week’s numbers:

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

It appears I have plateaued when filling my supplements pill planner, but managed to eek out another two-minutes when creating my DMSA capsules. That’s a reduction of 15%. Not too bad. I doubt I will see much more improvements moving forward, and wouldn’t be surprised if the time increases when I switch my dosing from every four-hours to every three-hours.

Jo Davidson, host of Zentertainment Talk Radio, sat down and discussed mercury poisoning with Andrew Hall Cutler, PhD, author of “Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment”. If you are interested, tune in to episode 96 via the episodes page, or listen directly to the MP3 file.