Being a millennial of a certain age has its perks. You’ve usually got a firm idea of who you are. You can leave parties early and no one questions you. People stop carding you at the store when you buy alcohol (admittedly this is something of a bummer, but I choose to see it as streamlining the purchasing process).
Doctors also start suggesting blood tests “just to see how things are.”
(Or maybe blood testing has always been a thing and I just never had the means [read: insurance/finances] to get it? Yay for our system!)
Anyway, in August I finally went crying to my dermatologist about my cystic acne and some pretty dramatic (for me, anyway) hair shedding. The acne has been a problem all my life; it comes and goes, and up until summer I just…dealt with it. Prior derms informed me my only options were hormonal: the pill or spiro; I’m not opposed to them, but the former (while effective) caused mental problems for me in the past and the latter has a laundry list of side effects I wasn’t sure totally offset the zits. After all, I can cover acne up.
This summer, though. Hooboy. I had to cancel a dental appointment because a nodule prevented me from opening my fucking mouth. That, along with more hair in the shower drain than usual, prompted me to get in touch with the doc, who looked at my skin and scalp and then gleefully ran about a zillion blood tests on things like my thyroid, my hormones, zinc, etc.
Normal. All of it.
“Except your ferritin,” she said. “That’s…27.”
She did not sound pleased.
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“It’s not good…I’d like to see you at 60 or higher for hair.”
I understood. Twenty-seven was far from 60. “So I have low iron?” I asked. “But I listen to so much heavy metal.”
(No, friends, she didn’t laugh either.)
“Ferritin,” she said. “Your iron is okay, although that could go up, too.”
She managed to explain to me that ferritin is how much iron I have stored, while iron is what’s immediately available for the body to use. “Lots of young women are short on ferritin,” she said. “Menstruation and so on.”
The rest of my tests were normal, aside from my vitamin D, she said, which was also really low.
(Pause for jokes.)
“That’s 28,” she said. “How did you even get that low?”
Oh, the snide responses my inner 12-year-old cooked up. The only one I can safely reprint is “The dating pool is pretty shallow these days.”
Instead I said, “Um…I guess I don’t get out much?”
I did not share the real reason, which was that every bloody derm I’ve been to since I was 18 years old told me to avoid the sun. Apparently I followed their instructions a little too well, because now I am deficient (and yet I still have hyperpigmentation where is the justice? WHERE IS IT?!).
“Do you feel tired?” she asked. “Lethargic?”
“I prefer lazy,” I said.
She did laugh at that one, then repeated the question.
Lethargic? Probably not. Tired? Well, sure, but I don’t know if that’s iron-related fatigue or just…y’know…the ennui stemming from the last five years.
So now my eldritch ass is on a couple supplements. We will see how things go and probably test again in another three months or so. I will say the vitamin D supp made me feel perkier within like, two days.
Is it placebo effect? Or am I finally getting some much-needed D?
(Pause for jokes.)
As for my skin, well, remember I made the appointment back in August. I didn’t see the derm until October. My skin, perhaps wary of being threatened by next-generation meds, quickly cleared itself up, yielding only the occasional whitehead. Annoying, yes, but a far cry from the cystic insanity. The derm did prescribe a couple things (including the pill and an antibiotic) but I’m playing the wait-and-see game here, too.
I intended to close this blog with a couple of iron jokes, but I couldn’t find any that actually made me laugh. Oh, the iron…y.
(Sorry.)