Lack of Iron Man

The meat machine that I inhabit is a frustrating thing.

First, it has to have regular strenuous exercise, or I get sad and demotivated, which then makes it harder to actually do the regular strenuous exercise it requires. This of course means that any break in the pattern leads to a lovely negative feedback loop and a downward spiral that sounds like a fun carnival ride, but is decidedly not.

Second, it has very specific requirements about the sort of fuel that it will accept in order to actually function correctly, or it just breaks in subtle ways. Too much of the food that tastes good, and it gets fat and slow and I get sad, too little of the actual food that it needs, and it gets weird and unreliable, and I get equally weird and unreliable by extension.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post, but not before I do the thing that I always do right now, which is to warn you that this is one of those classic stream of consciousness posts that I do when I want to still write something but I don't want to invest into a full-fledged blog post.

You have been warned.

Anyway, I give blood regularly.

It makes a lot of sense to me, because I have plenty of blood and can easily make more blood and other people often need blood to not die. Also, the more people who feed the vampires, the less likely it is that they will start hunting us again.

I've been giving blood pretty much every three months for the last ten years or so, which a few gaps here or there for various reasons I can't really remember. This is an educated guess, because I recently crested 40 donations and that's how math works.

Shortly after the last time I gave blood the Red Cross rang me up and cancelled my next appointment to give blood because I didn't have enough iron. More specifically, the levels of ferritin in my blood were lower than the recommended amount, which is a hard disqualification from giving blood.

Ferritin is the protein that stores iron, which is then used to make things like red blood cells, which do all sorts of useful things like carry oxygen around so that the meat machine that is the human body can function.

Some of the symptoms of low ferritin are fatigue, difficulty concentrating, restless legs, reduced exercise performance, mood changes and poor productivity.

None of that really sounded like me at all, so I was confused.

Then, after finding out I was low on ferritin, I did start feeling different. Mostly in terms of vague disorientation every now and then and a weird feeling that is hard to explain, but sort of feels like a narrowing of perception?

What followed was a fun trip down diagnosis lane, following up on a bunch of hypotheses and leading to no real conclusion about why the old meat machine was being weird, and a recommendation to take some iron supplements and then see how it goes.

The whole experience was frustrating on a number of fronts.

The first, and most obvious, was the complete lack of a meaningful conclusion.

I'm an engineer at heart. I like to understand things. I don't like it when the conclusion to a situation is for all the parties involved to just sort of shrug, gesture vaguely at the shape of my life and then back away slowly into a hedge with a vacant expression on their faces.

The second was that I didn't even have any data to pull from in order to come to my own conclusion. It would have been really nice to know what my ferritin was every three months for the last ten years, but the Red Cross doesn't always do the test, and I rarely get blood tests of my own.

I wanted to know if it had been low for a long time and I'd just sort of acclimatised to any of the symptoms, or if I wasn't feeling anything because the change in my ferritin levels had only just started to shift, but I couldn't know that.

Which leads me into the last point of frustration, which was that I couldn't even know for sure if I felt weird because my ferritin was getting lower and lower or because my brain just decided that now that it thought that something was wrong, it was just going to make me feel weird because why not.

In summary, the meat machine that I rely on to exist is a poorly documented, bewilderingly engineered thing and I wish someone would release a series of strongly opinionated updates that fix what I assume are a bunch of known issues.

Though I certainly don't trust any of the other meat machines out there to actually achieve that without just causing more issues.