Bartonella brain-dump

I’ve been treating Bartonella without blogging. In theory this should be no problem, but it turns out that to think things through, I need to write them down.

First the history: I was fairly successful with Babesia. Someone gave me an idea of what to try, how to build up my coiling program so that I could eventually knock out the infection without harming myself with herxes. The plan worked, only I did it much sooner than expected because I was keeping track of my symptoms. Now I don’t have Babesia symptoms. The infection is either gone or dormant, possibly because the load is low enough to be deactivated by the Lyme or Bartonella infections.

History part 2: I was really scared of doing a full body scan of Lyme. I slowly built up a program based on conversations with several other coilers. At some point, one of them suggested I increase it significantly. I had reduced the infection load enough at that point to build up fast to a more extensive coiling protocol with longer times. By January, I was able to take a short break. Once I started up again, I noticed that the severity of the herxes diminished from week to week to the point that I couldn’t really be sure I was having them. That’s when I stopped for a few weeks and discovered symptom creep and began coiling again. Last time I wrote, I thought I wasn’t having noticeable herxes anymore. Ha! Then I had a herx from coiling my whole body in one day. Headache the next day. Loose stools. Joint pain in my neck and limbs. Fatigue. I felt wiped out, but it only lasted 3 days and diminished each day. So I know the infection is still active, but I’m confident that I’ve got the treatment plan under control.

Bartonella is not so easy. Originally I thought it would be more like Babesia. It supposedly grows much faster than Lyme and has milder herxes. Over the past year, I went from coiling my chest and abdomen every other day to every day in order to keep the symptoms at bay. So the idea that it grows quickly seemed validated. This spring, once I stopped Babesia and the Lyme herxes were less menacing, I started increasing my Bartonella coiling until it covered my full body. This was okay as long as I was going to a sauna at least 4 times a week. Once I couldn’t go to the sauna, the herxes caught up to me. But first things first, this is the treatment

Bartonella Full Body Scan

Coiling Frequency: 832 Hz

Total coiling time: 30 minutes

• Top of head, 1 minute
• Each side of head, 1 minute
• Back of head, 2 minutes
• Each shoulder (with the coil sitting on the nub of my shoulder), 1 minute
• Chest, 2 minutes
• Each side of ribcage + each arm, 1 minute
• Abdomen, 5 minutes
• Upper spine/back, 2 minutes
• Central spine/back, 1 minute
• Sacrum/lower back, 1 minute
• Each ilium front, 1 minute
• Each ilium back, 1 minute
• Each hip/outer thigh, 1 minute
• Between my legs in 3 places: thighs, knees, shins, 1 minute each
• Feet through coil, 1 minute

My rationale for this protocol is that I’m convinced that a big part of the infection, the actual bacterial colony, is located somewhere either in my head, my neck or my upper spine. I think this because my hormones (as in the pituitary-thyroid-adrenal axis and my insulin regulation) have gotten all screwed up in the time leading up to my getting disablingly sick and got much worse since then. My other inkling is that my vagus nerve is very sensitive and gets stimulated into making me feel very unwell (hand/foot pain, nausea, digestive issues, blood pressure drop, heart palpitations) when I coil or at various other times, like when my period comes. Coiling for Bartonella also makes my arms and legs tingle a lot. Working on Lyme didn’t get rid of these problems. Some things have diminished with Lyme, but get worse again with Bartonella herxes. Some of the cardiac and blood pressure issues were ameliorated as a chronic problem once I got through the Babesia infection, but they get worse again with Bartonella herxes.

Swinging back around to why I coil more than a minute in various locations, I focus extra time around my neck/chest/upper back and head to get at the pituitary gland, the thyroid gland and the vagus nerve. I do extra time on my abodmen partly for the digestive symptoms and partly to take care of my pancreas (insulin) and adrenal gland. I’m not sure this is perfectly reasoned, but it’s what I’ve come up with, and it gives me bigger herxes than I expected when I started out.

Bartonella Herxes

I spent a year doing my abdomen and chest. Then I added in other parts of my body a little at a time. As I mentioned, I was sweating it out in a sauna at the time. When I added in all the extra stuff on my upper body, the herxes got much worse than they did for any other body part. And I had no clue how bad these herxes could get.

For me, Bartonella herxes consist of: kidney pain, dark and strong-smelling urine (different from the Lyme smell), low back pain (around my sacrum), constipation or at least very dry stools, nausea, pain and tingling and a feeling of heaviness in my arms and legs, tension in my shoulders and upper back, severe fatigue, thirst, headaches with light sensitivity, crankiness and irritability, a feeling of hopelessness (usually focused on whether I’ll ever get better), restlessness (feeling like I never get anything done), and changes in my menstrual cycle (as in making it much longer that it ought to arrive and making pms and the first few days have more severe symptoms).

Bartonella has the most obvious psychological aspects to the herxes. I’ve heard other people talk about feeling severe anger or rage when they coil for Bartonella. I’m lucky, I guess, that I feel hopeless instead and that I’ve set up my life with lots of reminders of what to be hopeful about.

When I look back at the months I was using IV Rocephin to treat Lyme, I remember severe kidney pain. I initially thought the kidney pain was a prelude to the kidney stones I got after 13 weeks on Rocephin.  But, I’ve read that Rocephin is used for intractable cases of Bartonella. Now that I’ve experienced the kidney pain again, I think the Rocephin was attacking my Bartonella but I didn’t recognize the die-off symptoms.

Let me clarify a little further. It seemed to me that most of the Lyme toxins exited through my intestines, with diarrhea as one piece of evidence, and the use of bile binders and colonics producing significant reduction in symptoms as another. These haven’t been the case with Bartonella die-offs. Those seem to be processed in the kidneys, and through sweat, so that my kidneys are stressed and painful in the presence of big Bartonella die-offs (unless I sweat it out).

What to do next?

For the past few days, I’ve been wondering if Bartonella reproduces so quickly that I need to be coiling every day as I had concluded earlier…or if I was attacking the wrong area of my body so that the infection wasn’t really diminished from coiling my abdomen and chest and would thus be back to a symptom generating level within a day or two. Since I started the full body coiling program, I’ve had to scale back to twice a week because the herxes were too intense. This has kept me at a level where I don’t get Bartonella symptoms, yet I’m having a hard time with the herxes.

I guess the most obvious thing is to sign up for the gym and start going to the sauna again. I’m planning to do that next week. The second most obvious thing is to reduce how much I’m coiling so that I’m not incapacitated, but I’m attacking the source of the problem.

For now, the new plan is to continue at twice a week, to coil my head, chest, upper back, shoulders and abdomen (16 minutes) and see if that makes a difference. Then I can add in more time as soon as the sauna starts cleaning me out and taking the pressure off my kidneys.

Disclaimer

• Current Lyme Coiling Program
• Toxicity and Transitions

Categories: detoxification support, Herx reactions, iatrogenic complications, using the coil machine

Tags: bartonella, dry saunas, lyme, symptoms

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