Meet Rebecca Lee, recovering from amalgam illness

How old are you and what do you do for a living?
I am 65 years old and ostensibly retired. I live in subsidized senior housing on Social Security which I supplement by baby sitting my grandchildren. I also coach people in how to do the AC protocol, which doesn’t pay very well because usually people are so sick they are broke.

What health problems have you recovered from and how long did you experience them?
I must have had my first amalgams placed at eight or ten years old. My father was a diplomat so there were oodles of travel shots. I always thought that constantly changing countries was what me feel such an “outsider,” but apparently toxicity had something to do with it, too. I went to a tony girls’ boarding school and became obsessive about the honor system they had there. In retrospect, it seems like a mercury symptom to me.

When I arrived home from living in India, a dentist drilled out 8 amalgam fillings and replaced them with more amalgam. I had a nervous breakdown and cried all day for a couple of weeks but didn’t put two and two together. After that I found myself constantly looking for solutions to chronic depression and being tired and energy-less all the time. I was tired all the time before this, too, but was young enough to soldier through it.

So I was always looking for treatments. I did no end of cleanses and fasts. I treated myself for parasites and thought that they were just from having lived in the tropics. I treated myself for Hep C and got my liver enzymes down to normal. But no matter what I did, it wouldn’t stick…I would always relapse into dragging myself around.

What symptoms bothered you the most?
The worst symptom was depression. I used to wake up in the morning and check if it was still there and it always was.

Can you tell about any low points where you may feel you hit bottom?
The worst thing I can remember is when the doctor put me on Paxil and it gave me a panic attack. I thought it just hadn’t had time to work yet so I bore with it for quite a while before I called him and he told me to stop it immediately and prescribed a tranquilizer. My anxiety centered around an insurance bill that was overdue and I didn’t have the money to pay.

All I could do was stand in the corner and stare at the wall. I clearly understood how people can kill themselves because of mental suffering.

How did they impact your work and home life? Your relationships?
I ran a food manufacturing and delivery company with my husband. It was a very stressful way to make a living and I always thought that that was why I was depressed. It involved heroic hard work and there came a point where I just couldn’t do it anymore and we wound up going bankrupt. Getting old didn’t help, of course, but what was really needed was consistent marketing and I had a toxic aversion to this kind of work.

As far as relationships…I don’t have one anymore. There were definite problems on my husband’s side but he found himself with a wife who had no libido and was exhausted all the time.

How did you get a diagnosis for your problems and how did you find the solution? What was the solution?
I started to get breast cancer and my DC told me to go see this super duper chiropractor who cost 200 dollars just to talk to. At first he treated me with a bunch of supplements and I started to feel better, as usual. Finally I told him that I felt lots better but I had one weird symptom which was: no maps in my head. I couldn’t remember how to get from one place to another. He said “as a neurologist (he was a chiropractic neurologist), I find that a very disturbing symptom,” and gave me a DMSA challenge test, which fortunately didn’t kill me. Of course it came out positive as I had a mouth full of fillings…but that is how I got going on mercury detox.

He put me on high dose infrequent DMSA with my amalgams in place which made me cry all day. A second challenge test showed no change. By that time I was becoming a difficult patient and he started shunting me off to his son. Nobody likes treating mercury toxic people, especially if they don’t know how. I literally cannot remember why I stopped chelating this way. I certainly got sick of the enormous expense of seeing this guy.

I think I found Cutler by rooting around on the internet. I remember the excitement I felt when I got the book.

Once you got on the right path, how did you know it was the right path?
I didn’t know if it was the right path. I went on faith and because it sounded right and made sense. I gave Andy’s book to my son-in-law who is also a chemical engineer and he said it made sense.

What was your recovery like? Can you describe any setbacks in your recovery process you may have experienced?
I got considerably worse before I started to get better. I got a second episode of breast cancer that required surgery and radiation. Then I had two hip replacements and I had gall bladder surgery. So that was all some kind of toxic blast. Then after I had been chelating for some time I got what must have been a huge relapse of Hep C, which had not made a peep for years. My liver enzymes went sky high.

I had four crowns in my mouth which I had not checked under because my old dentist, “thought they were all right.” I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I was going to have to pony up the money and get the damn things removed. My teeth must have cost me $10,000 all together. My mother died (at 95 with Alzheimer’s) and left me a small nest egg so I was able to do this. Two of the crowns had amalgam under them. They were just small flecks but it turns out that is enough to make you really, really sick if you chelate. After that, chelation went smoothly.

What kind of support did you have from others?
A little from one of my daughters, the one with the chemist husband. But, mainly you are on your own because nobody who is not sick this way can possibly understand. The FDC forum, on the other hand, was a BIG support. And Andy, who I communicate with from time to time. He is unfailingly kind.

You are on the other side of the paradigm shift with this stuff. People who haven’t grasped it yet can never understand. You are the “voice crying in the wilderness.” You can hardly even help people who are needlessly going to their deaths right in front of your eyes.

Can you tell about any memorable high points in your recovery process?
It has been a long slog. After about a year I started to notice I was better. I encourage people to keep a chart of some kind of their progress because the change is so slow and incremental and because we forget the bad stuff so fast. I know about six months ago I posted on the FDC forum that I was starting to feel like a normal person again. I could get through the day without crashing, like a normal person.

The big epiphany was this last week when I went on a marathon trip to France with my daughter. I was scared I would get sick from it. It was much more strenuous than I could have ever imagined but I came through with flying colors. I stopped chelating for two weeks for this trip and I noticed I was so much better. I ate everything though I was still somewhat careful with sweets and breads….but I had loads of wine and champagne.

I slept at night. I didn’t crash. When I got home and rested up a bit I noticed two things: the nasty nervous irritation that is behind my insomnia had subsided and that my default emotional state was relaxed and happy…rather than slightly stressed and anxious all the time. I started chelating again at 100 mg of lipoic acid every three hours and the nervous irritation is back but I can live with it.

Did you do anything to celebrate your recovery? Is there anything you plan to do?
I don’t think I have recovered yet because I am still getting symptoms when I chelate. I just had a glimpse of where I have got to. When I feel good at 200 mg every three hours I will consider myself recovered. I had the glorious vision that someday soon I won’t need supplements and will be able to eat a big cup of cafe au lait with a muffin.

Andy said that you are done when you can eat at McDonald’s and nothing happens. I don’t think people realize this. If you are on a special diet to stay healthy, you are not done. (Not that I would ever eat at McDonald’s.)

What would you tell a family member with similar symptoms or diagnosis?
I see people all the time who are sick in this way and it is very difficult to get through to them. There you are on the other side of the paradigm shift and you feel like babbling and yelling at them to save themselves. Andy told me helping people is a difficult and hard to learn skill because you have to give them just enough info not to drive them away.

My brother is chelating…he listened to me, and though the rest of the family think it is hooey, they figure he has nothing to lose. (He has dementia.) At first they were mad and thought I was the one making him sick, but then he spent $3,000 totally uselessly to see a neurologist and they have arrived at this opinion about what I am having him do. It was a real epiphany for me when I realized that this toxicity clusters in families.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Yes. If Andy Cutler is right, then other protocols are wrong, unfortunately. My advice is: get all the amalgam out of your teeth, every last speck; only use chelators on their half life; don’t use cilantro, chlorella; don’t do IV anything except vitamin C and check the ingredients before you let anybody put a needle in you.

So far everything Andy has told me has been spot on. Go buy his books at noamalgam.com. You are probably better off doing this on your own because it is difficult, nigh impossible, to find a doctor who has even a rudimentary understanding of how chelation works. My website is maybe-its-mercury.com