At Last...An Excuse!

Finally, after all this time, I finally have a good excuse as to why I'm too tired to blog, too tired to cook dinner, to tired to go out (etc., etc.). I went to the doctor for the first time in years a little over a week ago just for a check-up and found out that I am apparently so severely anemic that the doctor was shocked I haven't keeled over from a heart attack yet. Anemia is the lack of iron in your blood, but more importantly, it affects the hemoglobin in your red blood cells - you know, those cells that carry oxygen from your heart to every other organ in your body, including your brain. Signs of anemia include constant fatigue, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and feeling cold all the time. You can't function at peak performance with severe anemia since you can never get enough oxygen from your heart to your brain. So all this time I've been blaming my increasing fatigue an inability to muster the will to do anything on my lack of sleep, but really it's because I'm not getting any oxygen to my brain. The symptoms of anemia are mostly annoying and not really dangerous; however, in cases where you have had for a long period of time, your heart has to work extra hard to pump oxygen to your vital organs and sometimes, well, it just works too hard and gives out. Apparently my levels are so low that I'm very nearly at that point (a normal, healthy person has a level between 15-30, my level was 7). It's wierd because in all other ways I am the picture of health. Anemia is generally the symptom of something else not a disease on its own, so they're going to have to do some more testing to figure out what is causing this in an otherwise normal and healthy person. But, honestly, I'm pretty relieved that they found this out (and not just because it would suck to keel over froma heart attack). I have been trying to figure out why I never seem to be able to kick this feeling of exhaustion or why I can't seem to concentrate for very long or why I don't ever feel like I'm at full mental capacity. I thought it was just that I don't get enough sleep and that I was just destined to always feel this way. Now I have a cause for my symptoms, one I can actually treat and, hopefully, recover from. So I'm feeling very positive!

Hubs celebrated my potential impending death by going out and spending in anticipation of the large life insurance settlement. Okay, in reality he went to a couple of garage sales and found this nifty cuckoo clock. It looks pretty damn ugly to me, but when he took it to the jewelers to see if it could be restored, he found out it is a very rare clock. One of only 25 made to be exact and one for which there is a nice collectors market. Hubs was offered a very tidy sum by the clock fixer upper guy, but he turned it down because he enjoys making me look at ugly clocks, lol.