Will you add me into your prayers, Arnie (and all!)?

My blood is just completely out of whack. I saw the hematologist today and we went over my blood test results from Monday. My ongoing problem (for years now) is that my hemoglobin and hematocrit are too high. They’ll drain blood out of me and within a period of weeks to a couple of months my levels are right back up there. I have a handful of consistent symptoms that make life a bit less comfortable, to say the least. Although they can’t diagnose me with polycythemia vera (a rare blood cancer) they’ve been ‘treating’ me for it now for a couple of years.

The blood work I had done on Monday came back showing that my levels were only slightly elevated (hemoglobin & hematocrit). That was surprising to me because I haven’t had my blood drained since December. Normally those levels would be a lot higher than they were.

The problem…my iron profile test. My ferritin level is very low, transferrin is high (out of range), TIBC is high (out of range), iron saturation is low (out of range), unsaturated iron binding capacity is high (out of range). My iron has somehow plummeted. And my ‘stored’ iron is getting very low. All prior iron profile tests came back with too much iron, which makes sense with my high hemoglobin/hematocrit. So this is weird. I have iron deficiency without anemia. With anemia, hemoglobin levels would be low. Mine isn’t, although it wasn’t as high as it normally would have been, it was still out of range high.

The bigger problem…they can’t give me iron supplements because that will make my already high hemoglobin even higher, and they can’t drain my blood now because my iron will drop even lower.

Ugh, wtf. Zero relief is what this means in a nutshell. Plus some extra fatigue. For at least the next two months before I repeat the blood work for a follow up. Like, wtf does that accomplish? Let's do nothing at all because 'we can't' and then repeat the same blood work in 2 months. Awesome. I'm sure this will feel wonderful physically. Just keep on kicking that can down the damn road docs!

I’m being referred to a GI doctor because of the iron drop. Something’s very wrong inside of me. :\ NOT looking forward to the testing the GI docs do.

FML