CW food issues, blood, suicide
I'm not sure how long I've been struggling with anaemia, but it may be fair to assume that it started long before I noticed it. My hypermobile body always gets tired easily, so noticing an extra thing contributing to that tiredness wasn't easy.
I bleed hard. I always did, even when on the pill. Now, while being messed about by being peri-menopausal, I bleed hard and irregularly. In March that meant three periods in six weeks, two of which were very heavy. That's when I became aware that anaemia was a problem for me. I was very ill, and for months after even when I wasn't being very ill, I was struggling to function because of how exhausted I felt.
I've been vegetarian for years, trying to push into being vegan. In theory, I should be able to get all the iron I need from leafy greens and kidney beans and whatnot. In practice, I can't. I take supplements, but this year those just haven't been enough. There's a limit on how much iron you can safely ingest this way without putting problematic amounts of pressure on your liver. And it turns out that not all iron is created equally, and that plant iron is hard to absorb compared to the iron we get from meat. One of the consequences of the hypermobility, is that it impacts on my digestive system. My ability to digest food is not what it could be - especially when I'm bleeding.
I made the decision to put meat back in my diet, once a week. Since doing that, I've started to recover and I've now weathered two periods without being massively ill. Mostly that's been a win, but the guilt is huge. At one point, when I was in a really bad place with my mental health, I ended up sobbing my heart out over a bowl of chicken soup because it felt so unreasonable to me that chickens were being killed for me. It didn't help that I'd recently been sent a review book that had a lot to say about how awful you are if you aren't a vegan and how anyone can be vegan easily and those who aren't, are not trying hard enough. I tried so hard, and the cost of doing it is high for me, and I don't want to end up in hospital or having heart failure.
I struggle a lot with suicidal thoughts at the best of times. Going through the anaemia, I have wondered repeatedly if it would be better and more responsible to let it kill me than to take iron from another creature. It's not a state of mind I would wish on anyone else, but I'm not always confident that keeping me alive and healthy is worth some other being dying for, and that's not a great place to be.
I'm sharing this in the hopes that it will help people be kinder to each other around issues of diet and choice. I'm in a difficult, painful situation with no easy ways out, and a solution that saves me from high levels of pain, exhaustion and panic, as well as making it more likely that I can stay alive.
Not everyone has a gut that works well. Not everyone can easily absorb iron from plants. Some of us need a lot more iron than others. I'm actively in favour of everyone reducing their dependence on animal products, on reducing the misery food animals are subject to, and in reducing the environmental impact of the farming industry. But I'd also like to feel ok about trying to stay alive.
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