Aine Ni Cheallaigh - Getting the Mercury Out

PART I

SILVER OR WHITE?

This book is about getting the mercury out, so the best moment to start this story is when my exposure to mercury began. It was a Wednesday afternoon. If it had been any other day of the week, things might have turned out differently, but it happened to be a Wednesday, so this is how it went.

On this particular day, one of our teachers happened to be sick, so we had a free class. This was an Irish secondary school run by the Sisters of Mercy. For the nuns, free class meant quiet supervised study time. We were in one of the science rooms, so my friends and I crowded our stools up to a bench near the back so we could have a whispered conversation. The topic at hand was my tooth. It had been aching on and off for a couple of weeks. Today was one of the worse days.

You should go to the dentist, my friend Mairead said. I went all last month. It was brilliant.

Dentistry didnt sound brilliant to me. I hadnt been for an appointment since I was little, but a few years back, Id tagged along while an older sister had a tooth extracted. The word dentist conjured up visions of soaking red handkerchiefs, and my mother scolding my sister, saying she brought it on herself by sticking her finger in the hole to see if the tooth was really gone.

I dont want to get a tooth pulled. All that blood, I shivered.

I got mine pulled and I didnt bleed at all, Mairead said. But pulling one tooth is not enough. What you need is lots of brown in your teeth to get fillings.

She opened up her mouth and showed us the shiny silver surfaces on her molars.

Fourteen fillings! she said. It took every Monday morning for a month. Do you know how much Maths I missed? Brilliant.

Do you think I need fillings too? I asked and opened my mouth wide.

Oh definitely, she said. Loads of brown.

Mairead Considine and ine N Cheallaigh! What on Earth are you doing? the teacher demanded.

Nothing, miss, we said, and took up our textbooks in a pretense of studying.

Make sure you go to Dr. Whelan, Mairead whispered out of the side of her mouth. He gives lots of fillings.

She wrote his phone number in the margin of my physics book. This was good. Dr. Whelan was our family dentist, the one whod pulled my sisters tooth.

Go during your worst class, Mairead said. Thats the time hell take you every week.

My worst class was Irish with Miss Burke. She hated me, I hated her. It was easier to take in the mornings, but on a Wednesday afternoon, right after lunch, it was torture to hear her droning on about ancient Irish literature. What made it worse this Wednesday was that my tooth really really hurt.

I raised my hand, excused myself and went down to the office, where the secretary made my appointment. I walked out of school, over to Dr. Whelans office, climbed into his chair, got the aching tooth pulled, and then blithely made one of the worst decisions of my life.

Youre going to need eleven fillings, he said. We can start right away. Do you want the silver ones or the white ones?

How many times will I have to come back? I asked.

Three, he said. Its best to anaesthetize only one quadrant of the mouth at a time, it keeps you from drooling like an idiot.

Great, I said. This was turning out exactly as planned.

So silver or white?

Whats the difference? I asked.

The white ones are more expensive.

I thought about my parents who were going to foot the bill for this whole escapade.

Definitely silver, I said.

* * *

It would have been very revealing if my health had spiraled down the drain right away. But thats not how mercury poisoning works. If I sit back now and scratch my head, its not easy to come up with a definitive First Mercury Symptom. I loved secondary school for the first three years, but the tide turned and I hated it for years four and five. Did the fact that I had my amalgams placed at the beginning of my fourth year have anything to do with this?

It could have just been a big case of adolescent angst, compounded by difficult home circumstances. I was the seventh of eight children, not unusual for a Catholic family in rural Ireland in the 1980s. By the time I was finishing secondary school, it was just me and my younger sister living at home with my parents. My parents were tired out, uncommunicative, with nothing to give after decades of hard parenting. My younger sister was developmentally delayed because of a brain injury she had suffered during an epileptic seizure. Its easy to pin it on circumstances, but looking back, my joy and emotional resilience began to slowly drain away during those years.

At the age of 18, I left my rural home to go to college in Dublin. I chose Dublin because it was Irelands largest city, and I wanted a fresh start in a place that was as different from the insular rural community I grew up in as possible. City life suited me. I enjoyed the independence, being exposed to new ideas and getting free of the conservative Catholic ideals I was brought up with. And yet, I was far from happy.

In my second year of college, I began to have stress-related breakdowns. Exam times often triggered huge anxiety and uncontrollable distress. I was a good student, far more knowledgeable than most of my classmates about many of the subjects we were being examined on, but I just couldnt handle my emotions and perform under stress.

In later years, when I learned about mercury toxicity, I read about how the first symptoms manifest as subtle emotional changes. Depression creeps in. There is an unwarranted sensitivity and irritability. Emotional reactions become less reasonable, even as the mercury toxic person insists that their reaction is a totally logical response to their circumstances.

That sums up my college days, and beyond, into my twenties. I sought out psychotherapy at the age of 19 and believed without question that the reason I was feeling awful so much of the time was because I had grown up in a dysfunctional family. There were plenty of reasons for me to feel like crap, top of the list being the fact that my parents had essentially left me to raise myself. They were busy struggling to care for my brain-injured younger sister whose case of epilepsy resisted all drug treatment, and whose behavior problems were off the charts. Why would there be any reason to look beyond that when searching for the cause of my emotional distress?

And yet, even now, I hear my therapists voice in my head saying, Why does it have to be childhood trauma or mercury? Why so black and white? Cant it be a bit of both?

I have put a lot of thought into that question. If heavy metals werent in the picture, would I have shaken off my childhood and lived a serene adult life, without the aid of therapy? The fact of the matter is, I dont know. I really dont. I know how emotionally stable I feel now that the mercury is gone. How can I tease out how much of that stability stems from a freedom from heavy metals, and how much is based on a hard-won foundation of emotional work I did during years of therapy? There is no way to ever know.

* * *

Mercury toxicity usually starts with emotional symptoms. Then a few years later, the physical symptoms arrive. When I left Ireland after college and moved to New York City, every week I put aside a good chunk of the money I earned as a nanny to pay for the best therapist I could find. I knew that I was emotionally delicate and this was the best way to spend my money. I didnt even consider spending a penny on health insurance. Why should I? I was as strong as an ox. All through my twenties, I didnt exercise, I ate a diet that was mostly made up of two main food groups, sugar and potatoes. And yet I rarely fell ill. The only mild ailment I suffered from was chronic constipation. But Id been like that since childhood, it was just the way I was. I basically saw myself as having an iron constitution.