If only this was about vampires. I dig vampires. Not the Twilight vampires, or the other shiny, sparkly vampire wanna-be craptastic love stories that are plaguing our innocent poster sections of stores, but cool vampires… like Dracula. He was awesome, in that “holy crap, that’s not a cool guy,” awesome sort of way. Team Drac, all the way.

Sadly, this isn’t about vampires. Its about blood, and my loss of iron. Earlier in the week, I blogged about body/weight and got to spend a few days thinking about what it all meant. I promise I was eating, but I guess it hasn’t been enough.

Wednesday, Freedom and I took the kiddos to a local water park. After being there about five minutes, I was moody. Well, I was probably moody before that, but I’m skipping that part. Freedom brought me cheesy bread sticks and a root beer, which I gladly ate, thinking I was having blood sugar problems. Not healthy, but it was a water park, so… yeah. But, it didn’t help. In fact, when I stood up after eating, I felt like I was going to faint. I had fainting issues years and years ago after a really bad tonsillectomy and they lasted for a long time, but I always attributed it to blood sugar. I had clotting issues that helped put me on the “high risk” category when I was pregnant. My blood, well, it sucks. Anyway, so, I sat down again and waited for the food to work its magic so I could frolic with the kids.

It didn’t happen. Each time I stood up, I was dizzy and light headed. I tried to stand in the water, thinking it would help if I cooled off, but I had to quickly sit down again, and again. I was miserable, and Freedom had to do the whole water park himself because I couldn’t move, and I was bitchy. Really, really bitchy. At one point, I managed to make it to the bathroom to pull myself together. I was pale and scary. The circles under my eyes were bad. My nail beds were pale. The metallic taste in my mouth suddenly became less annoying and more of an issue, and my tongue was swollen.

I did a little BlackBerry research. Anemia. Fuck.  I knew the olive and ice thing was iron-related, but I didn’t really think it was that bad. The day before, though, I couldn’t even drive because I was so tired, but I’m always tired. This tired is different. This is the tired where your body lays there in a pool of its mistreatment and your cloudy mind wanders off, not tired, but not exactly functional, either.

So, wow. I’ve not felt this bad in a long, long time, and there’s not even a snot monster involved. I have a 3-day weekend to tackle, work to catch up on and the rest of the back-to-school stuff to get ready before Tuesday, and my dearest partner-in-crime is off to NYC for the weekend. I’m camping out on the couch, eating all the iron and B-12 foods I can stomach (force-feeding myself at times *whine*) and I’m determined to beat this, and not let it happen again. The iron-y (get it?) is that now I get to obsess over high-fructose corn syrup, animal ingredients AND how much iron/B-12 is in what I eat, plus ensuring I actually eat the full servings (or more) because I don’t have enough issues with reading labels, eating, etc. I do have the Popeye theme song running through my head, though, so that’s fun. Perhaps, I’ll get some cracked out blogs out of this. Its not like I have anything else to do but sit here, right?

Yes, I know, it was bound to happen, and here it is. Moving forward by staying still. Ugh. Please send flowers, hummus and spinach.