I am most blessed to be in touch with you through this wonderful world of blogging. Today I am asking for your help!
Last week I started some baby steps in a new treatment protocol (called a Pretox Treatment Protocol) for mercury toxicity. The program is based upon the brilliant work of Dr. Chris Shade and Quicksilver Scientific. I am exceedingly grateful that my family doctor attended a conference where Dr. Chris Shade had presented on mercury toxicity. Dr. Shade developed mercury speciation testing and specific treatment regimes to open elimination pathways in the body of inorganic- and methyl-mercury. I completed several lab tests including their Tri-Mercury test and their Blood Metals Test is now in process. After suffering nearly 3 hellish years with daily seizure attacks and numerous failed approaches, we finally have hope for complete recovery.
The only problem is that I am having difficulty tolerating the Pretox Treatment Protocol! No surprise there: I react to everything these days. So here is my request:
Would you kindly contact Quicksilver Scientific and ask for a special consultation for me with Dr. Chris Shade? The company is exceedingly busy with expansion and Dr. Shade’s speaking schedule so a little extra noise might be helpful. Here’s the link to their website and where you can leave a message with my name and email address ( be sure to convert to an email address the following with numbers instead of words and “yahoo.com”: psalmthree4eightonezero@yahoodotcom):
I made this video for Dr. Shade to illustrate exactly what mercury poisoning has brought into our lives over here and my dilemma:
My husband Steve and I are hopeful that I am going to get well! We are exceedingly grateful for prayers and support of everyone and look forward to the day when we can celebrate together all that the Lord has done in this season of our lives. He is good. All the time. He is good!
Keeping it real today: it was the best breakfast I’d had in a long time. Held me over for hours. Can you believe it?
The ingredients were: gluten-free oats, coconut/almond milk, ghee butter, lactose-free whey powder, 2 walnuts, and bacon! Gee I often wonder if I need a ketogenic diet (KD) since I feel so much better after eating ghee butter and red palm oil spread by the tablespoonsful! I’d like to try the KD when I can find the medical professionals I’d need to calculate ketones and monitor cholesterol levels in this middle-aged frame. Otherwise it’s probably not a good idea long-term. Until then, just please pass the avocado oil for my coconut cream and blueberry smoothie!
The “champion” this morning was not me, however. My beloved Stevers was my hero as I was unable to move without eliciting seizure attacks in bed. So he fed me. Spoonful by spoonful of rich bliss came to me with breaks in between bites to catch my breath. I was so depleted from another hellish night dontcha know that I needed to rest often. And then I revived enough to take myself to the bathroom and return to bed for more sleep. A brief noxious episode ensued, an indeterminate amount of sleep, and waking convulsions on the other side. Holy cow!
My other hero today who kept me company when I awoke sometime in the afternoon was our pup, Elle. She often watches over me these days, sleeping within view of the bed. Next to Jesus Christ, I love having a friend nearby with fur-on. That is true only if my friend with skin-on has to go to work! My beloved got there 2 hours later today for having taken care of me this morning. I am so grateful for his care and hope his boss understands . . .
The afternoon was slow-going as I progressed from being beat-up to stable. I recovered quickly from a brief afternoon replay of this morning. I am glad that thereafter I was able to finish the Fall clean-up for Winter and gather some anise hyssop seeds for a friend before lopping off the last of the spent garden beauties. Then I plopped myself down in front of the computer for a few hours and was able to do nothing else. My sewing project 2 feet behind me, due in 2 weeks, will wait once again. Such is life in the preparatory stages of mercury chelation. Working on kidney detox to aid the chelation pathway for inorganic mercury. Hmmm. Sure hope I clear before Thanksgiving . . . sure would like to travel to see some friends and family . . .
My heart is heavy with all of this. Knowing my brother may be stuck in a nursing home for more months is a burden too. His Social Security Disability Income will likely take awhile to be awarded even though the left side of his body remains quite debilitated from the stroke in April. I am glad that he was able to go “home” with his fiancé for a few hours yesterday: the first time since this all happened. Finally! Sish. The occupational therapist in me has been frustrated more than once by the whole ordeal. Therapy is on hold again for Mike due to Medicaid paperwork delays. So life in a better nursing home is where he will be indefinitely. Kinda sad, really.
In case this is sounding like a pity party I will end it right here. Just keeping it real. I still have that joy in my heart that I wrote about this past weekend. I still have hope that I will be restored to health and probably land in an even better place a couple of years from now when the mercury chelation process has succeeded. I still am grateful for so many blessings that were never in my life even one year ago. I have a plan for recovery! I still look forward to the simple pleasures that make life so sweet. Ah yes, here comes our German shepherd wagging her tail from having played with my hubby in the front yard since arriving home from work.
It’s late. It’s time for the dinner of champions, Steve and me. And it’s a good thing I saved a little bacon for us too. I mean who doesn’t love bacon? JJ
Some people think Christians should always be smiling and happy, and something is wrong if they aren’t.
But this isn’t necessarily true. Jesus stood outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, and we read that, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). As he approached Jerusalem “he saw the city and wept” (Luke 19:41) because of it’s spiritual blindness and guilt. He knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and was, “. . . in agony [and] his sweat became like great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44)
Don’t confuse happiness with joy. Happiness comes with happy circumstances; joy wells up deep inside our souls as we learn to trust Christ. Joy does not mean that we are never sad or that we never cry. But joy is a quiet confidence, a state of inner peace that comes from God.
Life’s troubles will rob us of our happiness, but they can never rob us of the joy God gives us, as we turn in faith to Him and seek His face.
The joy of the Lord is your strength. Nehemiah 8:10
From “What is joy?” in Hope for each day, (2002). Thomas Nelson, Inc. p. 338.
I get this and hope you do too, Gentle Reader. Few things can rob your happiness like waking up in the middle of the night 8-10 times with convulsive episodes and a massive headache. It probably wasn’t nice for my beloved husband Steve either, awakened from a sound sleep lying next to me. The aftermath for me felt like I banged my head in every direction against a wall. Not fun at all! Gratefully the dream I later woke up in the middle of (after more seizure attacks falling asleep) was a reasonable one. I mean that we had experienced something similar just under 2 years ago so it wasn’t that bad really.
I dreamed that Steve and I had moved temporarily into an apartment while some work was being done on our home only to have all of our belongings and the inside of the apartment become covered cascades of dust! Yeah, that was not good for someone multiply chemically sensitive like me knowing that mold is often lurking in dust. The situation was beginning to resolve when I woke up. Phew! It was just a dream! This time the headache was less and the convulsions were replaced with less violent seizure attacks. They actually helped clear my head some . . . and yet I still felt beat up. The next few hours were meaningless . . .
Regardless, I have joy! How is this possible you may ask? Well, it’s just like the quote from Billy Graham noted above. I have learned to trust Christ in all things, wretched or not. Of course I cry in sorrow when a new treatment intended to help me makes things worse for awhile. Call it a healing crisis, herxheimer reaction, or the like. It’s a bite in the shorts any way you slice it! But that doesn’t change anything between my Savior and me. He meets me on my bed of sickness and weeps for my suffering. This is not His intention for me yet at the same time my suffering will not be wasted because He has a plan for my life. Maybe one part is this: I am hoping that my suffering provided an illustration here of HOPE IN ACTION. I pray that it will encourage someone out there who is suffering too. HE CARES FOR YOUR SUFFERING TOO and will see you through it!
One day all of our strife and worry will be over as He makes our joy complete when He comes again in glory: with unimaginable happiness too! This promise holds true for those who love the Lord and call Him Savior. If you are suffering, please do not let that stop you from seeking the best hope you have in your pain: the person of Jesus Christ. His love covers ALL. In Him, you will find a joy that will transcend it all. Gentle Reader, please do not confuse happiness with joy. JJ
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This truth resonates with me today. My desire is to extend this truth to the only person still living who hurt me beyond measure. While much healing has occurred, I recently realized that more emotional baggage needed to be discarded out of my life from this old relationship for me to fully live in today. The process began about 2 weeks ago.
I knew that I needed to thin some files to make room for new ones in our home office. While this may not seem like a very large task since I keep fairly up-to-date with such tasks, there was a section in a drawer that had never been touched since it was created. Fifteen file drawers neatly organized alphabetically and the folders in the “Legal” section were bulging a bit too much. I had been in car accidents, named in the will of a few different parties, and survived a divorce with much accompanying paperwork telling the grueling details. The latter one was taking up too much space for my current lifestyle.
The Lord had convicted me many times in the past of discarding the “Divorce” section: the remnants of pain from divorce. I got rid of a few things awhile back but not enough such that I could still recount the many hurts, injustices, losses, and pain with the remaining documents. A sick badge of honor was left intact should I ever need to tell the whole story again. In holding onto more than the final court decision, I was burdening myself in more ways than I realized. Conviction came again when I was pleading with the Lord to heal me of a serious illness. At first it seemed so unrelated that I put it off once again. Then I decided to respond differently: with obedience. With trust. With faith. With swiftness.
I felt nothing after the folders fell into the recycling bin. Whoa. After all, maybe some good can come from the papers chopped and shredded into something more useful, eh? Within a day I had forgotten about all of those files and memories altogether. It is only in the writing of this blog that they have come to mind as I attempt to illustrate the power of letting my Jesus Who loves me and knows me so well lead me into His place of righteousness. Only He evens the score, makes things right. Only He redeems the hurt by filling it with His love. Only He will lead me into using the past for His glory should He choose to. Ahhhhh. Another measure of healing has come into my life by letting go of all of “the evidence” of sorrow. My Jesus transforms sorrow for His good. I am sure of this.
Now comes the next step: finishing the task of cutting off any energy that goes to feeding the pain from this great loss in my life. This is an ongoing practice. My former spouse left 11 years ago! So why did my curiosity cause me to check on his status periodically on the internet? I could justify it a million ways and virtually all of them drained my joy in today. So gently with the encouragement of another believer in Christ, I moved away from such nefarious activities completely. Decreasing the frequency further was not enough. Only by cutting them off have I found freedom!
Gratefully, all of this stuff has nothing to do with the love I receive from my intended beloved, Steve. He is an amazing man of God, after His own heart, whether or not I choose to love him with baggage or without. Oh yeah, I am blessed beyond measure! The second part of the admonishment from my friend was that I needed to get rid of these behaviors to be free to fully love Steve. My focus needed to be unhindered by pain from the past, especially that which I did not realize I was stirring up by dabbling in past hurts. What a dumb thing to do! My Jesus knows and holds my heart on all of these issues. My Jesus is leading me to himself more and more to become the woman He intends for me to be each day and in doing so, moves me closer to Steve within the covenant of marriage He ordained. Incredible.
The final step in this process (call it what you may: healing? letting go? letting God? joy?) is to lovingly dedicate Craig’s life to the One Who created Him just as he is. Oh sure, I have prayed for Craig hundreds of times. With a different kind of love I profess that the message of the cross is all Craig needs to come into the fullness of life. The message of redeeming grace is all Craig needs to find the answers to questions he once asked, he challenged, he doubted with, he ran away pursuing. The message of love, Christ’s everlasting love, will transcend everything he has ever felt in a finite earthly existence. And the love of our Lord will be perfect. The message of the Bible, that Craig used to profess in Sunday School classes so eloquently, is the only great read he will ever need to find joy and meaning.
And so Craig, I lay you before the Throne of Grace. I pray that you will look up and see the eyes of heaven open up to you and bring you the true desires of your heart in a relationship with Jesus Christ. In Him you will find nothing less than every good thing. I do hope you will find every good thing. I have. It is waiting for you as well.
In the meantime, I step away from this odd chapter in my old life. My life was restored and love beyond measure has entered into my heart. I am grateful for so much and a lot of it is in the form of one who is tall, blue-eyed, athletic, handsome, winsome, and loved and respected by many. Tonight I have the privilege of celebrating an accomplishment in the life of my intended beloved and I am honored to be there at his side as he accepts recognition for his achievement. I still know the greatest achievement stands above it all: his surrendering to the Lord, Jesus Christ brings true victory! Now that is something worth celebrating. JJ
Jesus is for the Wounded 
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