Lunch and a hot bath
This is going to be a rambling hot mess as I dredge up half-remembered info from the sands of time.
As an aside, I used to imagine that SOMEDAY Chipotle would pay me scads of money for saying nice things about them. Alas, this has never happened and probably never will.
They are obviously meanie faces and probably don't know I exist. (ME telling jokes to MYSELF -- for them to give me money presumes anyone cares how I got well, anyone has HEARD OF ME and my amazing story of getting better against long odds and yada -- AND also how can you be a meanie face for not paying me if you don't know I exist? You can't.)
Anyway, in the early part of 2000, I had the spiffy pro bono professional title of Director of Community Life for The TAG Project which came with ZERO pay and a boss who didn't appreciate me because ironically she hired me to do something she couldn't do well -- the social stuff -- then hated on me for being good at it and thereby supposedly "stabbing her in the back."
I'm sure this is more backstory than you want, but you are getting it ANYWAY.
BUT being Director of Community Life is how I got to be a low level "presenter" at a smarty pants conference for the gifted community held in nominally Boston that year (really, I think more like a suburb of Boston). This is polite code for babysitting very bright kids and keeping them from losing their marbles so their parents could attend REAL presentations at the conference.
I taught them to count in binary on their fingers. I'm sure you were DYING to know that.
Why the hell is this relevant? Well, because me being the respected lead moderator and having expertise in raising kids like mine is how it turned out that some woman ASKED ME my opinion about biomedical intervention for special-needs kids with issues like asperger's and ADHD and I made an ASS of myself because I had no fucking clue what that was and immediately blew it off.
Go, me.
So that's how I got referred to a list called autism-mercury because I knew her from my smarty-pants gifted homeschoolers lists and after she politely explained to me her interest and etc, I asked her where I could learn more so I wouldn't open mouth and insert foot AGAIN if anyone else asked. I would at least know what the hell they were asking.
So I am on this list to learn about this stuff that OBVIOUSLY has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH MY LIFE, CLEARLY. I just want to know for the sake of OTHER PEOPLE who thought I was smart and so I was taking it all in in a way you don't typically do if you feel personally invested.
At the same time and WHOLLY UNRELATED -- that is until these two details of my life COLLIDED head on -- I was eating lunch most days at Chipotle Mexican Grill because I was living in the San Fancisco Bay area and I was too poor for most of the spiffy stuff that most Californians do but I could afford this "land of fruits and nuts" California-esque thing and I really liked it. I felt all SPECIAL.
Me, loser that I am, living in Cali and eating Californication style food.
So I'm eating lunch there everyday and I'm newly diagnosed with CF -- by now we are well into 2001, I guess -- and I am reading autism-mercury and I'm trying like hell to figure out what the hell is in the food at Chipotle that I feel so much better eating there when I learn from this list that cilantro can be used to treat for metal poisoning.
I had already done enough research to know that most of the food at Chipotle is organic and some of the spices in the food help with respiratory issues and other things I was dealing with but all those details didn't seem to quite explain WHY this was making SO MUCH difference for me and this new detail felt like a huge epiphany: AHA! I'm treating for metal poisoning from my excess of dental work!!!!! DING DING DING!
Now autism-mercury was an AMAZING resource of intelligent people who knew all kinds of incredible things BUT its primary premise was that autism is caused by mercury poisoning (primarily from dental work and vaccines) and chelation is The Cure. These people absolutely helped save my life. And also HATED ME for being that nutter who didn't fit into their narrative AT ALL and was doing EVERYTHING WRONG.
So you basically have a bunch of paranoid antivaxxers and social outcasts -- but I repeat myself -- who don't trust anyone and they have hammered out some very specific things that they agree on and one of them is "Cilantro is the work of the devil and to be avoided in most cases." and also "We are all here to treat OUR CHILDREN."
So I trip across "cilantro moves metals" or whatever and have this huge epiphany about MY health and I begin innocently asking questions about "Whoa, wait a minute, what does cilantro DO and how do you USE it?" and I am met with a WALL of hatred from people screaming at me about what an abusive MOTHER I am for doing this TO MY CHILDREN -- or PLANNING to -- and yadda.
So it's like "Okay, TIME OUT. Slow down. I'm not doing ANYTHING at ALL to MY CHILDREN and this has NOTHING to do with FUTURE PLANS of any kind. I'm eating at Chipotle every day and trying to understand what that is doing to me CURRENTLY. That's ALL. Please kindly educate me."
So this is some of the dogma I remember from the list:
With their help, I was able to hammer out what was going on and some best practices and it was an email list, so they only put my head on a virtual pike a few dozen times for being so awful as to try to fix my life, not a REAL pike, thus I am still here to tell this tale.
I'm not going to try to bullet point this or give "takeaways" or whatever. That's way more organized than what REALLY happened, so way more organized than my relationship to what I know about metal poisoning and treating it WITHOUT doing proper chelation.
The lead up to the huge health crisis where I both nearly died and FINALLY got a proper diagnosis involved a series of dental surgeries and culminated in me ultimately having several large molars with large fillings either pulled or surgically extracted, sometimes after multiple other torturous and USELESS surgeries. So most likely, I survived in part because LARGE deposits of metallic substances called amalgam fillings (made with mercury -- a KNOWN poison) were REMOVED.
The fact that they were removed most likely left me in a situation where there was more metal poisoning in my tissues than from my STILL extant metal dental work, which includes not only amalgam fillings but a damaged bridge that contains gold (to which I am likely allergic). So consuming cilantro likely initially helped because there was MUCH MORE metal in my tissues than left in my mouth to stir up.
Eating at Chipotle ONCE a day followed by a hot bath HELPED. Eating there twice a day made me sick.
I have come to think of cilantro, coriander and MCT oil (which includes coconut oil, but also palm oil, ghee and some other things) as metal mobilizers and from what I gather true chelators need NO HELP to pull metals out but these stir things up and NEED help to actually get rid of metals. Hot baths help. Drinking coffee also helps.
If you are very sick and have metal dental work you CANNOT remove -- which was the case with me -- you can use metal mobilizers to REDUCE the degree to which you are poisoned without doing proper chelation. You will probably never be fully cured of the metal poisoning but, hey, life isn't fair and not all of us can shoot for ACTUALLY fixing our shit. Some of us need to just MITIGATE it as best we CAN.
At some point, I probably passed some threshold where enough metals had been pulled out of my tissues and now eating at Chipotle was primarily pulling metals from my dental work and making me more poisoned by dumping it into my system. I moved elsewhere not hugely long after that, to some hicksville that had not yet been subjected to Californication, so it had no Chipotle and that put an end to my spiffy Cali-cool meals and gave me a break from removing metals as part of my healing journey.
I later returned to California under circumstances where I was MUCH, MUCH poorer, so I had access to Chipotle but much less money to spend and no access to hot baths afterwards. I resumed eating there, but for a long list of reasons, generally ate smaller meals with less cilantro and it continued to help my health.
I eventually again moved away from California and to some hicksville with no Chipotle and in spite of my fantasies of taking the bus to the nearest city with a Chipotle to bring back a few days worth of actually GOOD FOOD, I have been deprived of access for over six years now, bah humbug, so mostly NOT pulling metals out again, though that was not some kind of "plan" related to my health to "take a break" from this or whatever.
When I first began eating at Chipotle, I would order these HUGE burritos with double rice, among other things, and the staff had trouble getting the tortilla wrapped around it all. I initially figured that this worked for me "because rice is plain and I have digestive issues" but I later revised that analysis: The RICE is primarily where the CILANTRO is. (I think the corn salsa also contains cilantro and I LOVE their corn salsa.)
So one of the things that happened is that as I got healthier, I stopped asking for "double rice" and that defacto halved the amount of cilantro I was consuming.
When I was homeless and eating at Chipotle, I went through periods where I tried to eat there every single day, but I would order like a single hard shell taco with beef barbacoa, lettuce and corn salsa, not some GIANT burrito with everything and the kitchen sink.
If you eat there and are anemic, their steak and barbacoa are both good. (If you have any chewing challenges, get the barbacoa.) Order it without cheese and don't have a quesadilla if you are trying to improve your iron status.
If you want to get takeout or delivery, fresh burritos, tacos or a bowl to be eaten NOW plus chips and dip and quesadillas to be eaten LATER would be my fantasy of how to win at life (and something I did a few times when homeless and spending the night in a hotel).
I like both pinto beans and corn salsa as dip, personally. I don't typically eat anything with fresh tomatoes (pizza sauce is okay) because I'm allergic, but you do you. Pork is okay to have, but not too frequently as it is crazy high in selenium.
I declined this opportunity because I was newly homeless, sadly.
It was a Yahoo Group, a thing discontinued some years back while I was still homeless. As far as I know, it no longer exists in any form -- thus my willingness to poke a little fun at the whole situation.
As an aside, I used to imagine that SOMEDAY Chipotle would pay me scads of money for saying nice things about them. Alas, this has never happened and probably never will.
They are obviously meanie faces and probably don't know I exist. (ME telling jokes to MYSELF -- for them to give me money presumes anyone cares how I got well, anyone has HEARD OF ME and my amazing story of getting better against long odds and yada -- AND also how can you be a meanie face for not paying me if you don't know I exist? You can't.)
Anyway, in the early part of 2000, I had the spiffy pro bono professional title of Director of Community Life for The TAG Project which came with ZERO pay and a boss who didn't appreciate me because ironically she hired me to do something she couldn't do well -- the social stuff -- then hated on me for being good at it and thereby supposedly "stabbing her in the back."
I'm sure this is more backstory than you want, but you are getting it ANYWAY.
BUT being Director of Community Life is how I got to be a low level "presenter" at a smarty pants conference for the gifted community held in nominally Boston that year (really, I think more like a suburb of Boston). This is polite code for babysitting very bright kids and keeping them from losing their marbles so their parents could attend REAL presentations at the conference.
I taught them to count in binary on their fingers. I'm sure you were DYING to know that.
Why the hell is this relevant? Well, because me being the respected lead moderator and having expertise in raising kids like mine is how it turned out that some woman ASKED ME my opinion about biomedical intervention for special-needs kids with issues like asperger's and ADHD and I made an ASS of myself because I had no fucking clue what that was and immediately blew it off.
Go, me.
So that's how I got referred to a list called autism-mercury because I knew her from my smarty-pants gifted homeschoolers lists and after she politely explained to me her interest and etc, I asked her where I could learn more so I wouldn't open mouth and insert foot AGAIN if anyone else asked. I would at least know what the hell they were asking.
So I am on this list to learn about this stuff that OBVIOUSLY has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH MY LIFE, CLEARLY. I just want to know for the sake of OTHER PEOPLE who thought I was smart and so I was taking it all in in a way you don't typically do if you feel personally invested.
At the same time and WHOLLY UNRELATED -- that is until these two details of my life COLLIDED head on -- I was eating lunch most days at Chipotle Mexican Grill because I was living in the San Fancisco Bay area and I was too poor for most of the spiffy stuff that most Californians do but I could afford this "land of fruits and nuts" California-esque thing and I really liked it. I felt all SPECIAL.
Me, loser that I am, living in Cali and eating Californication style food.
So I'm eating lunch there everyday and I'm newly diagnosed with CF -- by now we are well into 2001, I guess -- and I am reading autism-mercury and I'm trying like hell to figure out what the hell is in the food at Chipotle that I feel so much better eating there when I learn from this list that cilantro can be used to treat for metal poisoning.
I had already done enough research to know that most of the food at Chipotle is organic and some of the spices in the food help with respiratory issues and other things I was dealing with but all those details didn't seem to quite explain WHY this was making SO MUCH difference for me and this new detail felt like a huge epiphany: AHA! I'm treating for metal poisoning from my excess of dental work!!!!! DING DING DING!
Now autism-mercury was an AMAZING resource of intelligent people who knew all kinds of incredible things BUT its primary premise was that autism is caused by mercury poisoning (primarily from dental work and vaccines) and chelation is The Cure. These people absolutely helped save my life. And also HATED ME for being that nutter who didn't fit into their narrative AT ALL and was doing EVERYTHING WRONG.
So you basically have a bunch of paranoid antivaxxers and social outcasts -- but I repeat myself -- who don't trust anyone and they have hammered out some very specific things that they agree on and one of them is "Cilantro is the work of the devil and to be avoided in most cases." and also "We are all here to treat OUR CHILDREN."
So I trip across "cilantro moves metals" or whatever and have this huge epiphany about MY health and I begin innocently asking questions about "Whoa, wait a minute, what does cilantro DO and how do you USE it?" and I am met with a WALL of hatred from people screaming at me about what an abusive MOTHER I am for doing this TO MY CHILDREN -- or PLANNING to -- and yadda.
So it's like "Okay, TIME OUT. Slow down. I'm not doing ANYTHING at ALL to MY CHILDREN and this has NOTHING to do with FUTURE PLANS of any kind. I'm eating at Chipotle every day and trying to understand what that is doing to me CURRENTLY. That's ALL. Please kindly educate me."
So this is some of the dogma I remember from the list:
- (The LATE) Dr. Andrew Hall Cutler (PhD in chemistry) is the best source of info on chelators, their half life and yadda. You should totally buy his (now out-of-print) books if you want to do proper chelation which doctors typically know NOTHING about.
- Do NOT chelate until AFTER you remove ALL metal dental work or other medical metals (pins, for example). (Me: Guilty as hell of STILL to this day having a mouth full of metals, heathen that I am.)
- There is NO KNOWN chelation protocol for silver, so do NOT upon pain of death or for ANY reason EVER use colloidal silver for any goddamned reason, so help you GOD.
- If you are treating for lead poisoning, you need calcium because it settles in the bones, which means pulling it out leaves you with a weakened skeletal system and this can lead to a broken bone.
- Celtic Sea Salt is the absolute bestest salt ever in the history of the entire universe. It is like 84 percent salt (NaCl) and 16 percent other micronutrients and just BUY THIS SHIT. (I did. It is, though I am well enough I don't buy it anymore. Alternately, you CAN go to the beach and I currently live near the coast for that reason.)
- There are other salts we trust to NOT poison us, like Himalayan Pink Salt. (You can buy spiffy popcorn with this. It's GOOD. I swear.)
- IF you have metal poisoning, whether you are chelating or not, you should be AWARE that cilantro, coriander and coconut oil can stir things up and cause problems. So know what you are eating and how it interacts with metals.
With their help, I was able to hammer out what was going on and some best practices and it was an email list, so they only put my head on a virtual pike a few dozen times for being so awful as to try to fix my life, not a REAL pike, thus I am still here to tell this tale.
I'm not going to try to bullet point this or give "takeaways" or whatever. That's way more organized than what REALLY happened, so way more organized than my relationship to what I know about metal poisoning and treating it WITHOUT doing proper chelation.
The lead up to the huge health crisis where I both nearly died and FINALLY got a proper diagnosis involved a series of dental surgeries and culminated in me ultimately having several large molars with large fillings either pulled or surgically extracted, sometimes after multiple other torturous and USELESS surgeries. So most likely, I survived in part because LARGE deposits of metallic substances called amalgam fillings (made with mercury -- a KNOWN poison) were REMOVED.
The fact that they were removed most likely left me in a situation where there was more metal poisoning in my tissues than from my STILL extant metal dental work, which includes not only amalgam fillings but a damaged bridge that contains gold (to which I am likely allergic). So consuming cilantro likely initially helped because there was MUCH MORE metal in my tissues than left in my mouth to stir up.
Eating at Chipotle ONCE a day followed by a hot bath HELPED. Eating there twice a day made me sick.
I have come to think of cilantro, coriander and MCT oil (which includes coconut oil, but also palm oil, ghee and some other things) as metal mobilizers and from what I gather true chelators need NO HELP to pull metals out but these stir things up and NEED help to actually get rid of metals. Hot baths help. Drinking coffee also helps.
If you are very sick and have metal dental work you CANNOT remove -- which was the case with me -- you can use metal mobilizers to REDUCE the degree to which you are poisoned without doing proper chelation. You will probably never be fully cured of the metal poisoning but, hey, life isn't fair and not all of us can shoot for ACTUALLY fixing our shit. Some of us need to just MITIGATE it as best we CAN.
At some point, I probably passed some threshold where enough metals had been pulled out of my tissues and now eating at Chipotle was primarily pulling metals from my dental work and making me more poisoned by dumping it into my system. I moved elsewhere not hugely long after that, to some hicksville that had not yet been subjected to Californication, so it had no Chipotle and that put an end to my spiffy Cali-cool meals and gave me a break from removing metals as part of my healing journey.
I later returned to California under circumstances where I was MUCH, MUCH poorer, so I had access to Chipotle but much less money to spend and no access to hot baths afterwards. I resumed eating there, but for a long list of reasons, generally ate smaller meals with less cilantro and it continued to help my health.
I eventually again moved away from California and to some hicksville with no Chipotle and in spite of my fantasies of taking the bus to the nearest city with a Chipotle to bring back a few days worth of actually GOOD FOOD, I have been deprived of access for over six years now, bah humbug, so mostly NOT pulling metals out again, though that was not some kind of "plan" related to my health to "take a break" from this or whatever.
When I first began eating at Chipotle, I would order these HUGE burritos with double rice, among other things, and the staff had trouble getting the tortilla wrapped around it all. I initially figured that this worked for me "because rice is plain and I have digestive issues" but I later revised that analysis: The RICE is primarily where the CILANTRO is. (I think the corn salsa also contains cilantro and I LOVE their corn salsa.)
So one of the things that happened is that as I got healthier, I stopped asking for "double rice" and that defacto halved the amount of cilantro I was consuming.
When I was homeless and eating at Chipotle, I went through periods where I tried to eat there every single day, but I would order like a single hard shell taco with beef barbacoa, lettuce and corn salsa, not some GIANT burrito with everything and the kitchen sink.
If you eat there and are anemic, their steak and barbacoa are both good. (If you have any chewing challenges, get the barbacoa.) Order it without cheese and don't have a quesadilla if you are trying to improve your iron status.
If you want to get takeout or delivery, fresh burritos, tacos or a bowl to be eaten NOW plus chips and dip and quesadillas to be eaten LATER would be my fantasy of how to win at life (and something I did a few times when homeless and spending the night in a hotel).
I like both pinto beans and corn salsa as dip, personally. I don't typically eat anything with fresh tomatoes (pizza sauce is okay) because I'm allergic, but you do you. Pork is okay to have, but not too frequently as it is crazy high in selenium.
Footnote
I was extremely, extremely sick and miserable at the time, so the degree to which I felt hated on was likely exaggerated. Actual reality: At some point, I was offered the chance to take over as moderator for the autism-mercury list, so maybe they didn't COMPLETELY hate me.I declined this opportunity because I was newly homeless, sadly.
It was a Yahoo Group, a thing discontinued some years back while I was still homeless. As far as I know, it no longer exists in any form -- thus my willingness to poke a little fun at the whole situation.
