When you have a medical condition that can become a disaster if you eat the wrong thing, you kind of stop wanting to eat. Like, I could eat this unassuming bowl of soup and possibly set my pelvis on fire, or I could postpone eating until it's no longer relevant and lock my current pain level in for the foreseeable future.
I've tried the latter, and it seems the point of irrelevancy as far as eating goes is death, not some robot-body swap-out or conversion of melanin to chlorophyll. I'm petitioning the gods.
In any case, when I found myself anemic in summer 2017, my gynecologist said that iron pills weren't necessary. They cause constipation, which can be a terror on the pelvis, and my iron level would adjust naturally.
Ha! Hahahahahaha. More than a year later, I found that every time I stood up, I'd close my eyes and fall asleep for half a second. Lovely dreams, teetering there next to my desk, snuggling papers meant for the copier. I'd had med changes, but if you've been through this stuff, you know the difference between new-med tired and other tireds. New meds make me drowsy. Anemia makes my pulse race when I vacuum.
So that year over which my doctor said I should've been reacquiring iron was a year over which I ended up not reacquiring iron, and I did not reacquire iron because I hate eating. Over calendar year 2018, I followed the 80/20 eating rule: 80% of the time I avoided eating, and 20% of the time I ate food from the gas station.
Gas stations have crap food, but some crap food is kind to my pelvic pain: potato chips, popcorn, Natural Cheetos. All naturally lacking iron.
I really did not consider the fact that my diet might not actually be providing me with all the nutrients I need. Isn't that insane? I worried about calories because I didn't want to dip below my weight minimum. If I felt like I hadn't been eating enough, I'd eat the simplest possible thing: a vanilla milkshake. At only 800 calories, they can also soothe bladders! So between gas stations and the ice cream shop, I kept my BMI in the normal range. But as I was already in a spot with the anemia, I didn't have the stores in my body to weather my narrowed diet.
Alas, the forces of my many ills have combined and thrust me upon the shore! Of taking iron pills and trying to eat more meat. I've also returned to the spinach-and-two-bananas smoothie, which I really missed making. Remember the good old days when I actually tried to fix my pain? When I actually believed I could do it? When I had an ever-expanding spreadsheet charting every damn thing I did in a day to see if I could spot what the pain demon was feasting on??
I BELIEVED back then. I HAVE NOT BELIEVED in a very long time. In fact, I think I entered a relationship after my spreadsheets failed me just to avoid any more trying. Spreadsheets cannot fail us, people. It is we who fail the spreadsheets. ("We" is the correct pronoun here. The "to be" verb does not take an objective pronoun. I am not citing any sources and I am relying on a mental note made seven hundred years ago. If I'm wrong, it was the iron.)
(I could stay in parentheticals forever, couldn't I? I could keep posting to this blog in parentheticals and never have to make the next logical statement in the progression of this blog post. Question: would my post titles have to be parenthesized as well? Question: do you also feel like you're underwater in your underwear when you're reading parentheticals? Question: do you read parentheticals?)
Look, it doesn't matter when I last believed. What matters is I know a lot about my pain, about where it comes from and what drives it and what alleviates it, and those things don't require some airy faith to uphold. They are facts. What I need instead is to be able to live inside the constraints of the facts. Because that is a strict little space in there, and we all have a limited amount of self-discipline. I have to figure out how to build mine up again so I can observe the laws of my pain while living the rest of my life and without eating my meals at the gas station.
