• A pulse with a total of nine pills. (500 mg metronidazole, two a day for five days, except I wimped out on the last pill, as my heart rhythm became somewhat irregular, with quite a few missing beats and extra beats, and I had some minor chest pain. The irregular rhythm was a recurrence of something I'd had a few years before; I'd gone to the doctor, then, worn a heart monitor for 24 hours, and been told that it wasn't anything worth worrying about. Soon after that, it mostly went away; but a residual irregularity -- occasional missed beats or extra beats -- had remained, which then went away after a few months on the bacteriostatic antibioticsⁱ. On this pulse, it came back as strongly as at its worst; but after the pulse it quickly went away.)
• A pulse with a total of fifteen pills (three a day for five days). This felt about the same as the nine-pill pulse, except that it didn't affect my heart as much.
• Another 15-pill pulse. This one hit harder. Toward the end of it, I developed a revolting sour smell (and taste in my mouth) which I normally associate with old people in bad health.
• Another 15-pill pulse, which hit about half as hard as the previous one.
• Another 15-pill pulse, with added niacinⁱ: besides taking 500 mg slow-release niacin twice a day, on three occasions I took 500 mg non-time-release niacin together with a metronidazole pill. Each time it walloped me. Again, toward the end, I was smelling like an old person.
After this pulse, I had the followup MRI. From here on, I stayed on the slow-release niacin (500 mg bidⁱ), as I found it vastly improved my acne.
• Another 15-pill pulse, this time with lots of niacin: I took a 500mg non-time-release niacin pill together with each of the first two metronidazole pills of each day. Again it was pretty brutal, but this time my heartbeat didn't become irregular; the beats just became a little more abrupt, but they remained regular.
After that pulse, I had an appointment with my neurologist, to go over the MRI results. The lack of any new lesions seems to have made an impression; he is now seriously interested in Cpn. It didn't take any persuasion at all to get a prescription for rifampin. After starting rifampin (which I've since been on continuously, at 600 mg once a day), I waited a couple of weeks before the next pulse, since I reacted strongly to the rifampin. But it was perhaps not enough, as the next pulse was:
• A 7-pill pulse, with a total of something like three pills non-time-release niacin. I aborted this one after the first pill of the third day. The taste/smell had become so strong that I was almost involuntarily shaking my head as if to get rid of it. Also, I was nauseated to the point of vomiting; and the nausea didn't quickly go away after vomiting, but rather lingered into the evening.
• A 6-pill pulse, with four pills non-time-release niacin: Again, I aborted this one, due to vomiting and overpowering bad taste. I went for blood work the day after aborting it; I later learned that my white blood cell count was decreased at that point (although still within the normal range).
At this point I decided to lay off the niacin (except for the time-release stuff), and (after a long break for Christmas) did another pulse, which turned out to be:
• A 15-pill pulse. Despite the strong bad taste, I managed to get through this pulse. Prior to this pulse, I'd thought my cardiovascular system had been pretty well cleaned out, since even the previous two abortive pulses hadn't changed its now-regular rhythm (although the beat had gotten a bit sharper, each time); and indeed even at the end of this pulse my heartbeat was still regular; but afterwards, for a week, a bit of irregularity came back (although nowhere near as much as in the first nine-pill pulse). Another thing that came back was the odd little random muscle twitches, every now and then. These were renewed with
• the following 15-pill pulse, which on the whole was about the same as the previous one. At the end of each, I was generally feeling quite lousy; it seemed as if it wouldn't take much more to push me into vomiting territory, where I'd have been aborting the pulse again. This time the cardiac manifestations came on earlier in the pulse; I suppose the system hadn't fully healed; or maybe cells cleared of Cpn during the last pulse were still committing apoptosisⁱ.

The main trend in this has been that my reaction to the pulses has generally been decreasing, so that I have to pile on more and more to get the same amount of suffering (and, presumably, bacteria-killing). But also, as I've learned what I can tolerate, and as the amount I can tolerate has increased with improving health, I've been increasing the level of killing still further.

Although I started this treatment because of central nervous system infection, it now seems as if perhaps only a tenth of the Cpn in my body was actually in my CNSⁱ. There was a fair bit in my cardiovascular system, in my joints, and elsewhere. Or if not Cpn, it was some other bacterium that this regimen is effective against.