A short health update and warning:

(Note: I wrote this post almost 6 months ago, but I completely forgot to publish it and it just sat in my drafts. I’m publishing now, as I hope it helps anyone who needs it!)

I was diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia early last year. I’ve had the symptoms all of my life, but never really realized that they were connected.

I was always cold, especially in my fingers and toes. East coast winters were especially unbearable for me.

I was often fatigued. I thought it was because of a poor diet.. there were many periods of food scarcity in my house growing up, and I developed pretty poor eating habits.

I’ve had dark circles under my eyes since I was about 7 or 8 years old, despite being a prolific and accomplished sleeper. At one point, my undereyes were so bluish-purple it looked like I had been punched. That’s apparently a pretty common symptom of iron-deficiency anemia, but there was no WebMd at the time, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The first inkling of a diagnosis came when I got a quick finger prick blood test during a gyno exam at a planned parenthood when I was 17. The nurse informed me I “might be a little bit anemic” before continuing the rest of the exam. I never really followed up on it. She didn’t make it sound dangerous. We could rarely afford to go to the doctor, and I was used to myself and my family members brushing off health complaints. I’ve always listed it on medical forms when I get checkups since then, but doctors mostly brushed it off when I told them how I learned that.

Over the last 2 years I started getting more and more fatigued. I had a stressful job and was feeling pretty burnt out, so I thought that’s what was causing it. After I left the job and got married (another stressful, but joyful, project!), I took several months off to do absolutely nothing and recover. And while I was feeling more mentally recuperated by the end of that time, I still didn’t have any energy at all physically.

So I went to the doctor and got some blood tests. The results came back that my iron levels were dangerously low. My doctor wanted me on a high dosage of iron immediately, taken with vitamin C to improve absorption. The recommendation that really scared me was her second one: if my levels didn’t come up at all in response to the iron, the next step would be to get a blood transfusion because my body was literally being starved of oxygen.

I’ve spent most of 2018 trying different iron supplements to see which work best for me. Iron is notoriously difficult to absorb and can cause some unpleasant side-effects. I first tried a generic chelate iron supplement with a separate vitamin C supplement, then one called Ferrasorb, which included the vitamin C and also contained other blood building minerals, and finally I’ve switched to SlowFe over the last 2 months, which is a slow-release formula that seems to absorb much better for me. Each new one I tried brought my levels up a little more than the one before it, but it was a slow process. Each time, I had to take it for a few months to stabilize and then get another blood test to check my levels. But each time I found a better supplement, I felt it in my body. I could feel a little bit more energy than what I regularly had before. I went from barely being able to get off the couch and do anything, to slowly feeling like a normal human being again.

One factor that made it harder for me to recover is that as a woman, I have a regular cycle of blood loss that wipes out some of that healthy new blood I’m building up. I also learned that my birth control method (the paraguard IUD), which was sometimes causing heavier menstruation, was only exacerbating the anemia since more blood loss == more anemic. Taking the iron supplements combined with taking an anti-inflammatory dose of ibuprofen during the beginning of my cycle has helped to reduce that significantly.

I wrote this firstly as a reminder to myself to not allow symptoms to linger, but also as an educational tool for anyone else who might knowingly or unknowingly have iron-deficiency anemia and need this information. Take care of yourself!