A lot of this depends on your current health and your goals. I think a year is reasonable, shorter is getting riskier.
If your goal is to get the amalgams out, and not increase the mercury your baby gets, then I think you could do nothing and just wait a year. Long term, mom would benefit by not having that slow accumulation of mercury and baby should come out about the same, vs mom not removing the amalgams and getting pregnant now.
If you're getting the amalgams out (are these your only amalgams?) because you think they are causing you health problems, you can make progress getting the mercury (and probably other stuff, because when we can't detoxify mercury, there are a lot of other things that use the same chemical pathways that are also building up), you can make progress in 9 months, and then you'd have to decide if you've made enough progress. I know I want 3 months of not mobilizing anything before I start TTC, I want to focus on nutrition and let the remaining toxins settle in somewhere, instead of circulating, for a while.
My timeline is this: Apr08 got my amalgams out, chelating from then til now, and I plan to continue until Jan2010, and then wait at least 3 months, and then TTC. I may push out the Jan2010 date if I think I'm not quite ready. I have health problems from my amalgams. I'm doing frequent, low-dose chelation, Andy Cutler style. You can check out the Chelating Mamas thread for details.
As for practitioners, if you are pretty healthy, it's less critical who you see. If you think you have health problems due to your amalgams, be very careful. A lot of the stuff that makes normal people marginally healthier can make amalgam-sick people really sick because it mobilizes too much. You need to balance what is mobilized with what you can excrete, and highly toxic people can easily get lots mobilized, then it circulates and re-settles and you feel horrible. So you'd want to look for a history treating people sicker than you, and then still check out the types of approaches they use. I found a healthcare provider who uses Cutler's approach, but she's got supportive stuff that makes it easier and faster (she's in Iowa, if you're nearby). The type of practitioner is less important than their knowledge of how to help mercury toxic (and heavy metal toxic, in general) people.
