Ever since Charlotte
When James came along I practically turned into a zombie. My head felt full of cotton wool most days and for the first time in my life my photographic memory started to fail me. Sometimes I struggle for the right words to express myself and my coordination has gone through the floor.
To me all these symptoms were things you could attribute to being a very tired mother of two small children who still gets up in the night to breastfeed, who still works and who doesn’t have a cleaner. Most of the time I thought I was being overly dramatic and I figured most mothers were in the same boat as me. So I didn’t say much about it to anyone except for Charles.
The next step happened six months ago when I started to get crabby and irritable. My patience became a thin fuse and despite having the most gorgeous, helpful little girl in the world I was constantly snapping at her* and my poor husband. I figured much of it was a reaction to the awful periods we’d been through while Charles was depressed and I still think that played a part in it. But it certainly wasn’t the whole story.
Then a couple of months ago things finally became unbearable. My tiredness became beyond not wanting to get out of bed. I’d wake up in the morning and my bones would physically ache. Despite the cries of my son looking for a feed it would take me a five minute mental pep talk to convince myself that I could get out of bed. Many times poor Charles would simply go and get him for me.
Just walking out the door and to my car to go to work in the morning felt like wading through molasses. It peaked one morning when I found myself thinking that if this was going to be my life from now on then it simply wasn’t worth it and I wanted out. That’s about the point that I realised something was really, really wrong.
My mother died so young from cancer and left so much undone. To me, life is the most precious gift you ever get so to think that I’d had enough and would be quite okay with going to sleep and not waking up again was a wake up call. That’s when I decided I needed help.
Last week I went to the doctor and cried. I poured it all out and told him how sick I am all the time, how tired, how crabby and forgetful, how much it hurts to just walk and how my brain doesn’t seem to work properly. I told him I knew something was wrong and begged him to help. He patted my shoulder, ordered every blood test known to modern medicine and told me to come back in a week.
The doctor was convinced he’d find something given what I was describing and he said his money was on an endocrine disorder – probably an underactive thyroid. I went home and Googled my symptoms. Dr Google was not as encouraging**.
Today I got my results. The doctor was obviously excited and pleased to see me when he called me in. He was grinning from ear to ear and almost giggly. We’re talking about a very sober 50-something man. He doesn’t normally do giggly. He asked me how I was feeling and I explained that I was sick (again) and he said he wasn’t surprised. Then he said he wanted to ask me one question before going through my results. Question, was I on any medication for cholesterol?***
Er. No. This made him really excited. He flashed my results up on the screen and told me that everything he saw indicated that I’m quite a fit person who eats well. My iron is fabulous (for a woman) and they rarely see cholesterol levels like mine unless the person is on cholesterol medication (normally bad cholesterols should be between 3.5-5.5 and mine are 3.6. Good cholesterol should be over 0.8 and mine is 1.2). He said he’d normally expect to see the sorts of results he was seeing on a very fit, active young woman and not an overweight thirty-year-old mother of two complaining of exhaustion.
Then he got to his big reveal. I have a chronic B12 deficiency. Meant to be between 200 and 600 mine are “under 50” which means they’re too low to test accurately. Low B12 is responsible for a bunch of stuff that can masquerade as other issues which is why it hadn’t been picked up until now. Plus there was the whole issue of my just soldiering on and not complaining about it. Basically I have almost no metabolism, no immunity, no energy, neural issues and impaired cognitive function.
By this time he was shaking his head in wonder and marvelling that I was even managing to get to work and go about my normal life. Most people with my sort of levels have had serious health issues that land them in hospital. The list of things B12 deficiency can cause is frightening. He described me as a “stubborn little thing getting by on sheer bloody will” and claimed that in 30 years of medicine he’d never seen anyone with levels as low as mine.
I started to cry while he walked me through the treatment. He was so excited I thought he was going to start dancing. I guess as a doctor it doesn’t get much better than this. He described the treatment as a “magic pill”. I need three injections of B12 and because my levels are so bad I need them a week apart for the next three weeks instead of the usually recommended three weeks apart. Then we’ll retest the levels and depending on how they look I may need another three injections. The beauty of it is that I’ll probably start to feel better within days.
I asked him whether I could correct the issue long-term with diet and this was where he sobered up. There are three groups of people who tend to have B12 deficiency – vegan children, people who lack the ability to strip the B12 from their diet and absorb it (these people are generally diagnosed early in life) and, finally, older people. He doesn’t know why my levels are so bad but he thinks it might be that I’ve spent my whole life not able to absorb B12 and it’s only now that the situation has become critical that I’ve been diagnosed.
The upshot is that I’m going to need monitoring for a long time and it’s distinctly possible that I won’t be able to fix things with a supplement – I’ll probably need B12 injections at regular intervals for the rest of my life.
I am seriously okay with that and I told him I would do almost anything to feel normal again. He laughed when I said that and told me that I probably haven’t experienced “normal” for my whole adult life. My B12 deficiency has probably always been present and has just been slowly getting worse over the years. He was almost crowing while he told me what a difference these shots would make and how it was going to be the best Christmas present I ever receive.
Now I feel like Alice
I’ve been crying with happiness off and on all day now. I’m fantasising about having the energy to be the wife and mother I want to be, to do the things I want to do without feeling like a 90-something-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. I wasted no time after my appointment – I had my first shot of B12 this afternoon. I’m going down the rabbit hole. See you on the other side!
* Charlotte
** Cancer, thyroid, cancer, cancer, cancer. Cancer of the thyroid.
*** Last year my bile duct got blocked by a gall stone. I found out when I turned yellow. My blood work at that point showed a cholesterol level of 7.9 which is extremely high but the doctor assured me it was probably just my liver being all screwy because it was backed up. I was supposed to have the levels checked further down the line but had never got around to it. So I asked to have it included it in the battery of tests.
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