I've been SO exhausted lately. I mean, I've always been relatively lazy, but this is different. At least, I think it's different. I wasn't this tired last year at this time after all the surgeries (not counting when I was on narcotic drugs, of course). All the doctors told me it would take me about a year to feel like myself, since I'd had so much anesthetic throughout the surgical process. So, I've been waiting to magically feel like myself again. Not yet.
Even taking into account my lack of exercise and weight gain, I'm just beat. Some days, it's all I can do to even get out of bed. I'm late for work most days. I'm not getting nearly as much done in a day as I used to. I'm having to stay in the office later and later just to stay relatively on track. At my recent job review, it was mentioned I sometimes seem 'unhappy' at work. I'm not unhappy! I'm struggling to stay awake! And on the weekend? I pretty much sleep through it. I'll clean a little bit of the apartment, lie down, clean some more, lie down. It's dumb. And the apartment is a bit of a mess. I've only cancelled a few get-togethers, but I make very few plans these days. And I don't fully enjoy the parties I do attend. I hate that. One of my greatest pleasures is enjoying time with my friends. But one Saturday this summer, it took so much energy just to get to a friend's picnic, I could barely speak to anyone once I got there, that just took too much effort. Some nights, I'm even not looking forward to going to the theater. I've pretty much stopped buying tickets for the near future. I mean, I have stuff coming up, but I bought the tickets a while ago. I've never felt this tired before. So then I start to worry. Worry that something new is going on. Worry that those five errant cells have found a place to land and are starting something up. And the worry wakes me up when all I want to do is sleep. It's a vicious circle.When I saw Dr. Pay-in-Advance in March, she took blood, just like any oncologist would do after all my stuff last year. I didn't hear anything back, so I figured nothing was wrong. When I saw her again in July, I told her about being so tired and she said, let's do a blood test. I told her she had done one already (sigh. if I have to pay in advance, the least she could do is look at my chart before my appointment. but I digress). She looked at the results and said, oh, you're really low on vitamin D. Take a 5,000 IU supplement. Uh, ok. I guess all those years of staying indoors and the massive amounts of sunscreen that led to my lily-white complexion are coming back to haunt me.
Oddly enough, all of the 5,000 IU supplements I saw online were made with gelatin, which makes them not-so-vegetarian. I briefly toyed with just taking the gelatin pills and using them as an excuse to eat bacon again, but thought, no, I can figure this out. I found a vegan supplement that was only 2,000 IU, but I figured it would be better than nothing. Dr. Pay-in-Advance assured me that other patients who started taking the supplement felt more alert immediately.
Not so much. Still tired. So when I went to my annual gyno exam in early September, I told my doctor (I've never given her a nickname - why is that, I wonder?!?!) about being so tired and she decided to do another blood test. Fingers crossed my insurance doesn't explode. But a week later (as opposed to having to wait four months), she called me and told me that I'm anemic AND massively low on vitamin D. So she gave me a prescription for 50,000 IU of vitamin D to take once a week for eight weeks (ok, your normal multivitamin has about 800 IU in them, so WOW that's a lot of vitamin D!!!), and a prescription for iron supplements. After the eight weeks, I'm to go back and get my blood checked again.
I've been taking them for a week, I guess (second dose of huge vitamin D pill was yesterday), so I'm ready to feel better. Not yet. If I hadn't had a massive deadline at work, I would've stayed home Thursday and Friday. As the saying goes, I'm awfully tired of being tired. Though I'm glad nothing worse turned up.
Clearly, I took good health for granted all these years and now I'm being forced to work harder on my own wellness. I should be exercising and cooking for myself, but that takes a lot of energy. Energy I need just to function some days. It's become like a slowed-down hamster wheel, where each day I'm spinning the wheel and trying to make something new happen and I'm so ready to jump off and feel like myself again. I feel lame starting up with the complaints and the worries again, but maybe if I think aloud and put stuff out there, I can talk myself into feeling like me again...
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