So, shortly before I was set to take my leave from work, to put everything down and figure out how to stop the damage, it got worse. This time it was my eyes (recall they had first started fluctuating after the Hep B vaccine, when I was in law school). Suddenly, my eyesight (both eyes) was blurry. But it was the type of blurriness that seemed to have more to do with my contact lenses and tear film than it did with my actual eyesight, as it would fade in and out. So I saw an ophthalmologist, originally assuming the contacts themselves were defective. But, this turned out not to be the case -- the doctor checked the lenses individually and called the manufacturer for possible manufacturing defects (there were none). Also, my eyesight correction hadn't actually changed, either. But, she did find something else: after 16 years of wearing contacts without any problem, I had suddenly developed giant papillary conjunctivitis (GPC), a fancy way of saying my eyes had become allergic to my own contacts. So, I was out of my contacts. Which was particularly stressful given that I am extremely nearsighted -- in the top 1% of myopics (near-sighted people). In other words, you can imagine my glasses aren't exactly the thinnest ever... It would be over a year before I'd be able to wear my contacts again.
And then, within the next few weeks, it got worse. My left eye just started killing me, without explanation or cause (in medical jargon, this was "idiopathic" eye pain). And believe me, over the next six months or so, the doctors looked for explanations. I think I saw six different ophthalmologists in three different states, including a retinal specialist that I drove almost five hours to see! I had test after test, with nothing unusual enough to explain why my left eye hurt so darned much. I did multiple courses of powerful steroids that did absolutely no good.
About the same time my left eye flipped out, an even more ominous development occured. I developed huge fields of floaters in both eyes. For those of you lucky enough not to have them, floaters are debris in the clear jelly-like part of the eye (the vitreous) that are near to the retina. They look like strings, worms, dirt, or debris that "floats" in the visual field (i.e., when you turn your eye, they don't move one-to-one with your vision -- instead they move slowly, catching up to your visual point of reference and then settling there -- literally, floating). The scary part is that they generally don't go away once they appear. And I didn't get one or two annoying floaters. I got hundreds of them in both eyes. Suddenly it seemed like I was looking through *dirt*. You never know how much you take a clear field of vision for granted until it is suddenly, irreversibly gone. You quickly appreciate that your eyes (and brain) are merely tools to process your surrounding environment when there suddenly is a layer of crud between you and that environment. It's like you're suddenly living in a fishbowl, or at least one of those "snow globes" that you can shake and stir up the fake snow.
So, suddenly, I was wearing glasses full time (last point I had done this: 7th grade), my left eye was killing me, my eyes generally hurt/were uncomfortable (from the GPC allergy reaction), and my visual field was full of dirt. Oh yeah, and my stomach pretty much felt full-time like I got punched there. So, perhaps it's not too surprising that I started to feel pretty depressed, too. But, in retrospect, I see that the depression was yet one more symptom of my whole declining health, probably a distinct neurotransmitter-mediated symptom, not a result of other things going wrong -- although, I'm sure those things were additive to the depression.
Well, nonetheless, I focused on getting that Stretta procedure I previously described done. I guess I figured somehow my eyes would just get better, and the only way out of the stomach nightmare was through this procedure. And, I did have it done, although I had to fly halfway across the country to do so. Nothing like voluntarily having your esophagus burned (through controlled energy, of course) and trying to eat soup the same day. Ouch. And, I was pretty sore for a little while. To jump ahead a little bit in the story, I think the Stretta definitely helped, but it didn't fix the problem. Over about the next six months, it became easier to eat meals. I gained some amount of confidence in eating that I had previously lost, and that made my life significantly better in one key area -- enjoyment of food (try to imagine life not enjoying food). But I continued to have pain in my stomach, particularly the punched-in-the-stomach feeling. However, the reflux had definitely stopped, according to two subsequent 24-hour pH tests and a third endoscopy I had. So, it was a mixed blessing -- the reflux was better and eating was easier, but I was still in substantial pain, showing that GERD/reflux was not the whole explanation for my GI problems.
Interestingly, later, that punched-in-the-stomach pain finally did go away and my stomach became dramatically better, even before starting detox. Guess what fixed the problem? Based on my records, the pain went away within 1-2 days after starting a sleeping drug (I also had horrible sleeping problems). Yes, a sleeping drug stopped my horrible morning bouts of pain. One of my theories about the sleeping / stomach-pain link is that this sleeping drug -- a hypnotic -- stopped my bad bruxism (teeth-grinding), which was sending mercury vapor and particles into my stomach overnight, causing dysbiosis (i.e., killing of good bacteria) and other havoc down there. I thought of this possibility when a dentist told me he uses this sleeping drug to treat bruxism. This scenario is also consistent with the fact that I no longer had this pain after my amalgams were removed and yet I was not using the sleeping drug at the time -- perhaps because there were no amalgams left to grind on. Who knows?
Anyway, back to my story. At some point during my six-month leave, while I was still recovering from the Stretta procedure, I started a course of tetracycline-family antibiotics, to try to get the meibomian (oil-producing) glands on my eyelid to start working again, hopefully to ease the allergic reaction my eyes were experiencing. On retrospective analysis of my records, I see that my next, and biggest, problem started just about two weeks after starting these antibiotics. This alone is strangely coincidental, but when the problem doubled in size almost a year later, within two weeks of starting another course of tetracycline-family antibiotics, I once again realized that I had likely found a causative factor. The new problem I developed was substantial back, groin, and leg pain. The link to mercury: in a study of rats given high doses of oral antibiotics, the half-life for excretion of mercury (i.e., the amount of time required for one-half of the mercury to be excreted from a rat) increased from 10 days to greater than 100 days. (Rowland IR, Robinson RD, Doherty RA, "Effects of Diet on Mercury Metabolism and Excretion in Mice Given Methylmercury: Role of Gut Flora," Arch Environ Health, 1984:39(6); 401-408). In other words, antibiotics reduce the body's ability to excrete mercury, and tetracyclines in particular have been to shown to increase mercury toxicity (e.g., Prof. Boyd Haley of the University of Kentucky has found tetracycline increases thimerosal's toxicity to neurons).
Basically, I believe that my body had been pushed beyond its detoxing limits by the Hep B vaccine, as demonstrated by my flipped-out eyes and stomach, and was no longer effectively able to move mercury out or neutralize its toxicity. The mercury thus was slowly accumulating. I accelerated that accumulation by taking the tetracycline. And where did the mercury go? To some of the lower areas of my bigger body cavities -- low-back and groin. Why did the mercury move to these particular areas? Well, consider why mercury is called a "heavy" metal -- heavy metals are, by definition, at least five times heavier than water. Mercury is about 14 times heavier than water. Thus, it sinks readily, and settles at the bottom of body cavities. In fact, the prostate is highly susceptible to mercury accumulation, in part for this reason (another topic to be discussed in the future...).
Assuming mercury does settle in the groin and low-back, consider the implications. How many people are suffering from low-back pain? How about groin pain, fertility problems, or hormonal issues? By the way, for the medically-oriented, some of the current theories on why antibiotics might affect mercury excretion rates include: (1) antibiotics kill "good" bacteria in the gut, which is a problem because those bacteria de-methylate methylmercury (a good thing), and also help keep yeast (e.g., Candida albicans) in check, which is important because yeast methylate mercury (a bad thing); and (2) tetracyclines are broken down by the glutathione conjugation pathway in the liver, which also detoxifies mercury, so if already-reduced levels of glutathione are required to metabolize the antibiotic, less is available to handle the mercury. (Interestingly, Tylenol is also broken down through this same glutathione conjugation pathway).
Anyway, this new development started about a month before I was preparing to return to work. I was running on the treadmill and noticed that my right leg was being strangely rotated out to the side by my hip muscles. Then, my groin started hurting, and I had pain shooting down my right leg. This was odd, as I'd never had groin pain before in my life, despite running on treadmills often. (You can see why, at various points, I totally lost confidence in my body, assuming that anything not yet broken was going to start falling apart at any moment...). Well, I saw a urologist, who initially diagnosed epididymitis, an inflammation in the groin area. I tried antibiotics and an analgesic (which was, I think, ... Vioxx. Great). I also had an ultrasound of the groin and a C-T scan of the groin/low-back region. Because there were no obvious problems in the groin, and the drugs hadn't helped, the urologist thought it might be nerve pain originating in the spine from spinal stenosis, or narrowing of the spinal canal. So he sent me to an orthopedic doctor. The orthopedic doc believed it might be a congenital defect (i.e., since birth), wherein the canal through some of the vertebrae of my spine might be too narrow, causing impingement or other mechanical pressure on the nerves.
At about this time, my six-month leave of absence from work was ending, and it was time to resume my job. I simply could not believe it -- I was actually worse off then when I first took the leave to try to improve my health. As if painful eyes, distorted vision, no contact lenses, and stomach pain weren't enough, now I had shooting pain down my right leg and groin pain. Oh, that was a fun way to start again, believe me.