Quick or right?

The question here is, do you want to heal yourself and/or your children quickly or properly?  I see a lot of biomed moms reaching at straws, looking for the magic bullet to heal their kids TODAY.  This is some sort of a mesh between biomedicine and our brainwashed alopathic medicine way of thinking, isn't it?  We are so trained to think we can pop a pill and cure a disease overnight.  The key word there is cure....we aren't curing ANYTHING by popping a pharmaceutical pill.  What are you doing?  You are suppressing symptoms and making things worse.  If you don't get to the root of the reason for the symptom in the first place, you aren't healing or curing anything.  But this isn't the purpose of this entry, actually so I will try not to get sidetracked.  Darn hot-buttons!!

My point here is that even us biomed moms can get caught up in wanting to try anything that will heal our kids even faster.  Well, I have news for you moms, it took years for this sort of genetic mutation and environmental damage to do it's work on you (your mom, your kids) and it's going to take just a teeny weeny bit more time to heal your children from this passed on type of toxicity.

I am certainly not suggesting that anyone stop looking for ways to think outside of the box or to help your child heal faster, BUT with that said, also be prepared to just settle for the tried and true to get you through.  I spend just about every day reading, learning and researching, as well as connecting directly with other moms who are going through this very same life. The recurrent theme I see developing is that those who heal most thoroughly follow a very strict diet, they work on nutritional deficiencies and they get the metals out.....for years.  When the metals are removed, all the rest will fall into place, it's that simple really, but patience is the key, because it is going to take time.

When we first decided on low frequent dose oral chelation we were convinced that we would be doing this for a year tops and we would have our perfectly recovered healthy child at the end of the tunnel.  So.....it's been two years  (3 with biomed) and although we have come a LONG way in recovery, we still have such a very long road ahead of us.  Our children are virtually indistinguishable from their peers, but this doesn't come easily.  They are still on hoards of supplements, require special diets, and will probably require years of slow, safe detoxing.  The part to come to grips with is that this is ok.  It is going to take a lot of dedication, sacrifices, perseverance and time, but that is ok, isn't it?

A lot of people question who they should trust when it comes to chelation, DAN! doctors or Andy Cutler and here is my take on this....Andy Cutler is a biochemist, meaning he is specifically trained to know what these chemicals do in our bodies.  He understands their half-lives and how they work, not to mention the fact that he recovered himself from being horribly ill, using this very same method of chelation. How many doctors out there do you know who are chemists? None.

So next time you get the inkling to try IV chelation, because you think bigger is better or a glutathione push, because well, glutathione is low so that MUST be the problem, right?.....or you hear about some new trendy supplement that claims to cure it all, don't get caught up in the glory, just take a deep breath and remember that recovery is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

Round 60 landmark

There is something about reaching round 60 with A/C chelation that is supposed to mark an accomplishment.  Many people report a reduction in the need for anti-fungal support, making this a much anticipated round to reach!  So, when we were rounding the corner to round 60, we were expecting more improvement.  Much to our dismay, the past handful of rounds have been incredibly difficult.  We had a period of calm for a while, then we got hit by these rough rounds full of anger, negative and argumentative attitude.  He's been bossy, self-centered, loud, mouthy, saying "what" a lot, but there are no tics, no sensory symptoms, nothing that reminds me of pathogenic overgrowth.  He's on the Alinia which kills anaerobic bacteria like Clostridia and e.coli, plus it addresses parasites, we have quite a few natural anti-fungal and anti-bacterial herbs on board in high doses to keep things under control.  It feels more like it could be symptoms associated with whatever metals we are pulling at this time.  We know that heavy metals pull in particular orders, so could it be the heavy metal in line for excretion at this time?

This brings me to our updated hair tests.  They frightened me to say the least.  Certainly not what I was expecting.  In one sense, it appears that the way they have met the counting rules is mild, which is an improvement for Grayson and a confirmation for Gavin, but their arsenic is OFF THE CHARTS high!  It has us wracking our brains to find the source, why would they BOTH have it the same otherwise?  They are a year apart in their chelation rounds, so it wouldn't make sense that they just happen to be excreting it at this level, at the same time.

Scary stuff, I can't stand knowing that there is possibly a source of arsenic around us and I can't find it!  OR, ironically, BOTH boys are excreting it at the same time for some reason, in unGodly amounts, OR their shampoo with sea kelp is an external culprit.  A lot of my research of kelp brought me to the conclusion that many kelp sources are contaminated with arsenic.  If supplements intended to be ingested are tainted with arsenic, I would imagine a shampoo is even more likely to be effected.

We are going to retest as soon as they need another hair cut.  I need to see, if things are different now that the shampoo is out of the picture.  We also changed our epsom salts to a pharmaceutical grade brand, just in case....and no more walking on the deck barefoot....and NO non-organic rice ingredients whatsoever...goodness, our limited lifestyle just got a heck of lot more limited.  I will post these updated hair tests, along with my own from pre-chelation, in the tab (above) with our hair tests.  This will be the third hair test for Grayson and second for Gavin.  It was only my first.....it was a lot of hair to remove from my scalp!!  lol  It wasn't noticeable or anything and it's growing back undetected since it's taken from so low on the scalp, but if I did multiple tests, I might start resembling one of those highlighting caps!!

Want to see the vitamin cabinet?

So here it is, our FULL vitamin cabinet.  Grayson said it looks like store shelves, ha ha ha.  He must enjoy organization as much as I do, because he thinks this "looks nice".  Only another organizing nut could appreciate the beauty of this cabinet, hahaha.

I'm slightly anal, I think the proper technical term for it is OCD, hehehe.  I like to have multiples of everything so that as we run out, I just grab another from the cabinet.  Considering there are three of us on this regimine now, we go through some of these bottles pretty fast.  For instance, the zinc picolinate which is 60 22mg capsules per bottle.  The kids use 5 a day between them and I use 6 a day!  I am opening a new bottle every couple of days!  The biotin too, we go through those really fast, but at least I can get 120 count bottles of that.

Within this organization, there is even more organization, the lazy susan is the kid's daily supplements, the step organizer to the left is full of my daily supplements, plus I use the kid's stuff, our Bach Flower Essences are in the middle, with some things that we all use behind them.  The second shelf has our illness supplements to the left and all of our unopened back-up bottles on the rest of the shelf.  The third shelf is all things that are used much less frequently, but always manage to come back to for some reason.

If you could see the inside of the doors, you would see pages and pages of notes, lol.  I type up lists of what supplements we use and where we buy them, lists of what to use for what and when.

I stocked up on three back-up bottles of Lugol's iodine recently, because of the risk of not being able to get it, due to the radiation exposure in the US from Fukushima.  People are scrambling to get their hands on it to help prevent radiation damage.  The problem is that prevention is the key, you can't erase radiation damage and considering radioactive iodine - 131 has already been found in the drinking water in PA among many other states and in foods in CA, it's probably a bit too late to be trying to prevent.  Perhaps it will help with all of the domino effects though, like how the rain water will feed the plants, how the grasses will feed the animals, and the half life of radioactive iodine in humans is 100 days, whereas it's half-life outside of a person is 8 days.

Sorry to get off track, I have a habit of doing that!

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

To back up a little bit, we had gone up to an LM4 potency of Grayson's homeopathic constitutional remedy, but every time we administered a dose, even just one drop, he would have an AWFUL day and I mean serious regression.  I was so confused, not knowing enough about what to expect, if this was normal aggravation to be expected with healing, if the remedy was the wrong remedy, if it was just too potent for him or were we dealing with completely different things coincidentally timed, like a yeast or bacteria flare, etc.

I contacted our doctor and she felt that the best way to handle this was to go back to the 30C potency and dose it daily, if needed.  That was just about a week ago.  We waited a day to give him the first dose of the 30C potency, so that his body could get back to it's baseline.  We had already been off the previous remedy for two days.  That first day we gave one drop of the 30C remedy and pretty much had a typical day with him....that consisted of some irritation, a low frustration threshold, but overall good mood.  His belly is always flat upon waking in the morning, but by dinner time (sometimes earlier) he is pretty bloated, and to give you a visual, think pregnant woman in her 7th month....bloated - and this day was no exception!

After a few days, we went up to 2 drops, he was having some rough moments still, not handling change well, fighting a lot with his brother, whiny and edgy, argumentative.  Even with the mood fluctuations though, he was still showing progress in other areas.  He asked us if he could go to the neighbors and ring their doorbell to ask for his golf clubs back (she borrowed them to use for her Kindergarten class lesson a few days earlier).  We permitted him to do this all on his own and he DID!  Impressive at 5, I know I wouldn't have done that at 5!! 

We decided to also go back to doing chelation since we had already taken three weeks off for the homeopathy.  Three weeks is our max, any more than that and we have a hard time with them adjusting back to the dose we were using.  So even with all the confusion, we jumped right back in at rounds 38 (Grayson) and 13 (Gavin).  Again, there were still some mood swings, but when Dave brought Grayson with him to his parent's house, he had NO fear of their huge dog.  You have to picture the usual visit ....we get to the front door, the dog (who is HUGE) starts barking his huge deep bark, Grayson runs away from the door and says, "Please put him outside!!"  Then we have to drag him inside behind our legs or carry him in until the dog is settled.  This day, he walked right in, nose to nose with the dog, no hesitation!!  He just turned his head as he was being greeted in doggy language!   He also kept a low belly all day for the first time in many months!

Now at 3 drops of his homeopathic remedy, and still chelating through the round, we being to see amazing days.  He dressed himself in matching pajamas all weekend, even tight shirts that he normally wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, because they are "toooooo tight" (AKA - sensory).  He participated in a song on tv about sequence.  He NEVER participated in tv show songs when prompted, EVERRRR!  They were singing a song about color sequences or something and then they would prompt the "kids" watching, the viewers I guess you would say, to finish the lyrics completing the sequence....my husband and I looked at each other, jaws dropped, when we heard him singing along and following the prompts out loud.  His thoughts were very complex and thorough all weekend and he appeared quite mature to me.  He was playing a game on my iTouch called Angry Birds and he loves to play while someone watches and then watch them play.  The game requires you to page past the scene you are in, to another scene, where you have to pan ahead and fire a slingshot aiming to knock down walls to get into them and attack these little creatures at all different levels.  It takes advanced planning and coordination.  This day he was asking his father, "How would you do this one daddy"?  and when he was watching his father play, instead of trying to TELL him what to do, which is the usual, he asked him, "Now, why did you do it that way daddy?"  truly looking for an explanation.  He also showed signs of patience and concern for what others were doing.  He wanted his father to play football with him, but we were getting the deck ready for restaining and he yelled up, "Can you play football with me, Daddy.....when you are done there?"  And all the while, the belly is still REALLY low all day long!

Today, he put his socks and shoes on without a single peep of a complaint.  Normally the socks or the shoes get thrown, because he is too frustrated by the task.  He was given his last dose of chelation as we left the house for the school bus, so I was VERY worried about sending him off to school while he would be experiencing post-round symptoms of yeast overgrowth and redistribution of heavy metals.  He is often VERY irritable, defiant, unfocused, spacey, lethargic, and very bloated....needless to say, this could put a damper on how well things have been going at school for the first three weeks.  So to make things a bit easier on him, I hid the capsule contents of an activated charcoal in a few coconut carob haystacks for snack time, hehehehe.  When he returned home, I was greeted with a smile, and he still had that flat tummy!  Unbelievable!  I had also asked the teacher how he did today, because I gave him mango which he used to react to (I needed a reason to have her report his behavior today, lol) and she said he was no different from any day, in fact, he had a GREAT day!  One thing that was very out of the ordinary today too is that he was exceptionally calm.  He always gets a bit riled up when Daddy gets home, and even more so as it gets closer to bed time, but not tonight.  He was not fidgety AT ALL, he sat at dinner calmly, he spoke calmly, he went to bed CALMLY, no running or hopping or joking around and hiding on us.  I felt like yesterday we had a 5 year old in the house and today he was much more mature than any 5 year old I ever met!  Things like this just don't happen overnight, I find myself saying that a lot with the homeopathy.  Things are definitely changing by leaps and bounds.  And we even took his lithium orotate away this morning with no ill effects!  But like my title suggests, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop....and hoping it never does.

Chelation Round 20

Before we started this round, we had Grayson treated for DMSA and ALA on the BAX3000, in addition to that, he was treated for yeast, and the three bacterias that showed up on his recent stool test: clostridia, strep and e.coli. This should ultimately reduce his sensitivities to these organisms.

I don't know, if it's the fact that we have hit 20 rounds of chelation or having his sensitivities reduced for the things which most often cause him major irritation, but let me tell you, this round resulted in change! We are seeing an amazing little spitfire of a personality unravel in the process. In fact, just today, we were at the health food store where he was carrying his own little child-sized bin of groceries. As he was putting them up on the counter, he looked the cashier directly in the face and said, "We can't forget the milk thistle, of course!" with such enthusiasm and proper pronunciation. Her response was, "You don't hear THAT every day out of a child!" How many kids even know what milk thistle is or that they need it replaced? And each patron he passed in front of, he would say, "Excuse me please", all of this unprompted by me. He is so polite, creative, bright, determined, independent, silly and sensitive, such endearing personality traits that are often clouded by a haze of illness. The kind of illness that most people don't recognize. Neurological illnesses aren't recognized quite as readily as say a child with Down Syndrome, who very obviously has physical traits marking the illness. Children like mine appear normal from the outside, they function normal to the average person...so when they have a disproportionate meltdown in a store or at a friend's house, it's tagged as the parent's fault for not disciplining the child better or even worse, excused as part of the "age". I am truly appalled by the number of parents who excuse behavior like this as normal. What is normal anyway? It's what we, as a society, have allowed our ill-diets to create. The more we hear other people say that "it's normal, our son/daughter behaves like that too", the more we sit back and allow that justification to let us do nothing about it. It's how evolution works, ever so slowly. As we get sicker and sicker (with pollution and toxins invading our environment and bodies) we are more neurologically effected. These children are the worst case scenario, but it's all around us in adults too, int he face of mental illnesses, autoimmune diseases, Chronic Fatigue, Lyme and the such. Even with all of the sharing we do with family and friends, it's as if much of what we say isn't believable, that is, until they experience our children before and after an antimicrobial treatment. You can't deny what you see with your own eyes!

This round has ended so well that we may continue with chelation this coming weekend! We typically skip a weekend between rounds, because he takes a good week to regulate after the round, but this time, he has been perfect, better than ever before! We want to pick up the pace, using his cues that he can handle it, in the hopes of getting much of his recovery under our belts, before Kindergarten starts in the fall. We have been at this for over a year and a half now, yes, it's a long process. It takes years to get like this, it will take years to un-do all the damage that has been done.

There are a few things we have added or changed in our treatment protocol recently and I believe they hold a piece of the puzzle. We added a new probiotic called Custom Probiotic which offers over 200 billion CFUs per dose, that many organisms HAS to have some effect on the bad guys! He wakes up great each morning with an absolutely flat tummy, I've never seen him looking so skinny!! We have also added Berberine and LDM-100 which I believe have both really knocked down some of the gut pathogens. We are working up very slowly on the LDM-100, because that is some potent stuff, but even at the low, slow introduction, I really think it is making it's mark in our regimen. Our next step will be a parasite cleanse with Humaworm.

Little by little, we are tearing away the layers. I am grateful to have this opportunity to heal my child!