Over the past week, I’ve been zooming ahead with coiling for Bartonella. At first, it was a relief. The day after I coiled my central nervous system three times in one day for the first time, I had so much energy. It felt like I woke up again after feeling tired for long enough that I was sure I was having a Babesia relapse.
After the initial burst of energy, the rest of the Bartonella herx kicked in with neuropathic pain and tingling and static in my arms especially and my legs as well. I had a few headaches. Then constipation started and kidney pain. The kidney pain is what really got to me.
To deal with kidney pain, my baseline treatment is chanca piedra, an herb, and the main ingredient in Renavive, which is what I used to use. I take it in the morning before I coil, giving me an hour to absorb it before I eat. When I was coiling my whole body over the course of a day, rather than focusing on my central nervous system, that was enough.
Intermittently, I was drinking roasted dandelion root tea, on days when chanca piedra was not enough to keep my kidneys happy. As I transitioned to coiling my central nervous system twice a day, I had to start drinking the tea, two cups made from one tea bag, every day. That kept the kidney pain level to a manageable level, though it never quite went away.
Once I bumped up the coiling to three times a day, the kidney pain was beyond tolerable. I was walking around with a sour-faced grimace all day long. The pain, itself, contributed to a feeling of being tired. Beyond that, my body just couldn’t keep up with the die-off toxins. I started to have insomnia, the kind that wakes me over and over at night with dark, fantastical dreams that seem so real and disturbing. My bladder feels irritated, I get hot and sometimes a bit sweaty. Each time I wake up, I can’t fall back to sleep for quite a while.
My first instinct was to add in hot baths. Those are tricky, because when I stop taking the baths, I have a Lyme flare. So I hesitated and procrastinated and cursed the pain in my back.
Saturday, I was cleaning out the cabinet where I keep all the supplements I’ve purchased. Every six months or so, I look in there to see what’s expired and to see if there is anything I want to take before it expires. I happened upon some milk thistle. I knew it was good for liver detoxification, so I put it on the counter to take on Sunday.
Milk Thistle growing in my neighborhood.
Milk thistle put me back on track. Within about two hours, the kidney pain was almost gone. It was just a faint shadow on my back. I was so relieved. Then I started looking up information about milk thistle and discovered that it also has protective qualities related to kidneys.
Like all natural supplements, milk thistle, dandelion root, and chanca piedra, have had conflicting results in scientific studies. I can’t say for sure how they work or that I’m taking an optimal dose of each. However, as I’ve tried each of them, and now using them in combination, they seem to be what I need to get through Bartonella herxes. I’m glad to have found my kidney cocktail.
My chaser, however, is for my intestines. It seems that all three herbs have some beneficial effect on the digestive system and the liver. In particular, the herbs can have a mild laxative effect. They certainly help. I have less pain and strain when I take them than I do when I’m herxing from Bartonella and not taking them. They aren’t enough. My evening chaser, which I take with the dandelion root tea, is two prunes. I’m not a lifelong prune eater or prune lover, but they help so much at this stage in my healing process. Just two at night make all the difference in Bartonella herx related constipation. (I know this well from the nights I forget!)
I’m still dealing with insomnia, headaches and some strange pain and sensations in my nervous system. Yesterday, I had a bout of congestion in my bronchial tubes, with a cough and everything. It went away overnight. In addition, I felt breathless shortly before bed: I was panting when I went down the stairs to get a drink, and panting again as I went back up. The Bartonella coiling is doing something and I think the Bartonella is trying to fight back.
Bartonella CNS Protocol
832 Hz — 45 minutes per session — 3 sessions per day
- Head: each side, top, back – 5 minutes per location
- Spine: upper, middle, lower – 5 minutes per location
- Each shoulder knob – 5 minutes per location
Note: when doing the upper spine, tilt head back to get a second round of 5 minutes on the back of the head.
Mixed Signals
To confuse the situation a little more, the disappearance of the need-to-lie-down-all-day-long fatigue the day after I bumped up the Bartonella coiling, also came two days after doing two days of Babesia coiling.
My experience has most frequently been that coiling for Babesia, when Babesia is the source of my symptoms, usually results in a pretty rapid change in symptoms (for better or for worse). So if nothing happens after two days, I write it off.
The exception to this pattern happened this past autumn, when I added 753Hz to my existing 570Hz Babesia protocol. I didn’t see a change for about 4 or 5 days. Then the changes were pretty mild, but definitely noticeable. I had night sweats and headaches after they had disappeared during that round of Babesia coiling. In other words, it is possible to have a delayed herx with Babesia (as happens with Lyme and Bartonella).
The result is that my conclusion that the fatigue culprit was Bartonella and not Babesia is a little cloudy. It could be that I killed off a small but growing amount of Babesia. Or it could mean that I got past the hump with Bartonella. I’m just not sure.
For now, I’m not exhausted and fatigued all day every day. I’m sleepy, probably because I’m up for several periods at night, but that is remedied with a nap. Post nap, I’m okay again.
Trailing Off
My Lyme herxes are trailing off. At this point, I have no symptoms of infection on a daily basis. Instead, I see symptoms only the day after I coil. I believe these are from the herxes rather than from bacterial activity. Furthermore, the only symptom I have is popping and cracking in all my joints. It isn’t too painful and it goes away over the course of a day.
I’ve dropped back from coiling every third day, to letting 4 days go by, and this week letting 5 days go by between coiling sessions. The herxes remain minimal.
Loving My Body
For quite a while, let’s say, on and off for a year and a half, I’ve been trying to lose weight. I gained a ton of it while I was taking Vitex and working on Bartonella. Both of those can help pack on the pounds.
During that time, I kept putting off purchasing clothes that fit me. I just didn’t want to spend the money, especially since I planned to get back to what I consider a healthy, comfortable weight (about 140 pounds). This has been a turnaround from the years when I was terribly underweight from all the infections and all the antibiotics. Back then, I didn’t want to buy clothing either, sure that sooner or later I would get back to a healthy weight.
Of course, by the time I bought clothes, I only had about a year during which they fit, before my weight went back to a normal-for-me 135 lbs. Still, at that weight, I look like an adult female (not emaciated or weak), and that’s the size I’ve been most of my adult life.
Then I added more weight and more until I hit 170 lbs. That’s when I stopped taking Vitex. It took a year to lose the first 10 pounds and keep them off. Now I’m trying to break the 160-lb barrier. It’s complicated. I think it’s possible if I go on a super-strict diet with no carbs and no sugars. I don’t mind giving up the sugar, and I already do it for weeks at a time. But I’m so sad at the prospect of giving up all grains and fruit, like I had to for 6 years when I couldn’t digest so many foods, that I can’t convince myself to do it again now. I’d be fighting an uphill battle anyway because Bartonella tends to mess with a person’s metabolism, making it easier to gain weight than to lose it. And finally, I have to be careful with the amount of exercise I do if I want to be able to get out of bed the next day and avoid heart problems. As I wrote about last time, I can do some but not much and not new forms without triggering a relapse of multiple infections.
What this means is that I’m putting some effort into losing weight, and it pays off only in that I’m not gaining more weight. Now, at a year of approximately the same weight, I finally broke down and purchased size 14 jeans. I might have fit into size 12, but I hate putting on tight jeans and feeling uncomfortable until they stretch.
What this has done is taken off the pressure. I can be relaxed about my weight and comfortable in my clothes…which makes me more comfortable in my body.
One last thought, one that came out of cleaning out the supplement cabinet, is that while I’m coiling for Bartonella, I might as well take the bone building supplements I bought when I was more scared about osteopenia. No need for me to let them expire only to purchase more at the end of the Bartonella cycle. Instead, I’ll add them in sometime next week, shortly after I make sure that the milk thistle dosage is in the right range.
Categories: detoxification support, healing process, Herx reactions
Tags: babesia, bartonella, detox
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Coiling for Lyme 