- A WOMAN who was incarcerated for a month
by doctors worried that she was insane after a violent attack on her mother
was subsequently found to have been poisoned by the fillings in her teeth.
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- Theresa Walker dragged her 59-year-old
mother, Cynthia, out of bed and chased her out of their house, hitting
her over the head and arms with a car steering lock.
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- She was sectioned under the Mental Health
Act and placed in a secure ward at the East Surrey Hospital in Redhill.
It was not until she obtained a second opinion from a private doctor that
the truth emerged.
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- The attack was caused by mercury leaking
out of the fillings in her teeth. She was found to have 10 times the industrial
limit of mercury in her body.
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- Miss Walker, 36, a telesales supervisor,
had been unwell for some months from the mercury poisoning. Her face had
swollen up but doctors initially diagnosed her as having a virus and then
suggested it might be chickenpox. By April, she had become convinced that
her mother was poisoning her and refused to eat or drink anything at home.
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- "For four days before she attacked
me she was just horrible," Mrs Walker said. "She was not acting
like my daughter. She was just very strange. She wouldn't normally harm
a fly but she became very aggressive. I was upset all the time wondering
what I had done wrong."
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- Over the Easter weekend she turned on
her mother. "I remember everything I did," Miss Walker said.
"I didn't have any blackouts. I can remember dragging my mother out
of bed by her hair and chasing her downstairs."
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- Mrs Walker said that she sat in a chair
cowering from her daughter who began to attack her with the steering lock.
"I was holding up my arm to protect myself and she was beating me
with it." She ran out of the door and took refuge in a neighbour's
house.
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- Mrs Walker was taken to the hospital
with bruises and cuts to her arms, head and body. The next day doctors
and social workers, accompanied by police, took her daughter to the psychiatric
ward. "I was put into a special ward. Then I stamped on a doctor's
glasses and they locked me up in a side-ward. I was drugged up and it wasn't
until the second week that I realised where I was."
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- For four weeks, she was confined until
her solicitor arranged a tribunal which found nothing wrong with her. But
it was not until she went to a private clinic in London that she discovered
what had caused the episode.
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- "The doctor took one look at my
face which was all puffed up and my eyes and said 'you're being poisoned'."
He traced the poison to mercury fillings, which were in common use by dentists
in the Seventies.
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- After having all her fillings removed,
she was put on medication to remove heavy metals from the brain and nervous
system and advised not to drink tap water. Now half the mercury has gone
from her system.
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- "I feel so much better now,"
she said. "For years I felt a kind of heaviness in my head which must
have been all the poison building up. I just feel so lucky that my mum
stuck by me."
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