Hi claythrow! Good to see you registered, I like to see who I'm talking to (so to speak).

Wow, have I heard this story before many times!!! Yes, you obviously loosened a load of mercury and possibly gone from chronic poisoning to almost acute. Andy has talked about this before too, that you can actually have a poisoned person or animal (from mercury) and if the mercury is stored and the body has attempted to store it as best it can, using a product that is not controlled, can not only disrupt that mercury but move into far worse areas, brain being one of them.

I assume that this is what may have occured with you. That mercury may have all been disrupted and could have been shunted into more sensitive tissue, your brain may be one of those areas, hard to say.

Yes, you can chelate with ALA now if you want. Though some people choose to start with DMSA even if they are at the stage where they are ok to begin ALA to see how they go. However, that is up to you. You can use both at this stage, or either.

Yes, toxic poisoning like this will blunt your emotions, so you don't feel anything (except anger and deadness/grief). So it's really odd, you feel numb towards love, but absolute utter deadness and despair on the other side. It is really horrible. It's so bad, I can look at my family and think "well I must love you...." but the feeling? It's gone. It's like going through the motions and simply being familiar with them, but not having that feelng with it.

So your girlfriend would be very wise to read the book of Andy's and check out the symptoms and the emotional deadness, she should know about. Make her familiar with this so she will better understand you, or should I say "the mercury" because this isn't "you" at all. You are pretty much being manipulated like a puppet and your senses dulled at the sametime. You will also cry, feel vulnerable, or sometimes even callous like you just can't feel sorry for others. It's unbelieveable what it does. And yes you feel weak and pathetic. Boy I know all this really well.

I reckon you got all the basic supplements you'll need, they sound good to me but you would need magnesium to add to that and possibly calcium and zinc if that helps. Plus make sure you're eating enough fats like butter, olive oil, etc. They help, with the fish oil you got and you could try flaxseed oil per andy's suggestions if that helps too.

Main thing is to avoid the dietry foods that can make you mcuh worse like sugar, wheat/gluten and other grains, honey, milk, fruit (because of their natural sugars) and concentrate on eggs, meat, vegetables (possibly lower or eliminate potatoes due to natural sugars). All these things may help because candida may now be part of your suffering. it usually goes along with toxicity and increases the misery (sometimes severely so).

But chelation will be the way to go from this point on. Diet, supplements are necessary to aid you along the way, chelation will be the way to start getting rid of this disrupted mercury.

How long do I think it would be for you to experience relief? Well, you could experience it very early on if you do things right, or a few months down the track. But even when you start feeling better, it's not a cure. It just means the mercury is being deal with more appropriately and the chelation is beginning to keep things more stable for you. Removing mercury can take far longer, but you can "feel" better earlier.

So I'd say there really is no exact time frame, because everybody is different. Give yourself a chance within the next few weeks and see what happens then.