Living With Anemia Quotes

I drank lots of water and orange juice and took a multivitamin and iron supplement for breakfast, which was my regimen since Bill had come into my life and brought (along with love, adventure, and excitement) the constant threat of anemia.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the fires of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until they who live on the outskirts of Hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heap of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into the bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace - so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world - inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

In his middle life, at about the time such things were known about, it was discovered that, he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.

paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies—and died younger—than the populations of human foragers who preceded them.

Furthermore, some researchers have suggested a strong association with the presence of the protective gene in populations who have historically farmed yams. To plant yams, farmers clear forests. Cleared forest means more standing water. More standing water means more mosquitoes. More mosquitoes means more malaria—so the idea goes. The emergence of the disease, and as a consequence the resistance gene, may well have been enabled, or at least nurtured, by yam farming. The persistence of sickle cell anemia is the cost of positive selection for resistance against the most destructive disease in our history.

A True Story Let me tell you about Wendy. For more than ten years, Wendy struggled unsuccessfully with ulcerative colitis. A thirty-six-year-old grade school teacher and mother of three, she lived with constant cramping, diarrhea, and frequent bleeding, necessitating occasional blood transfusions. She endured several colonoscopies and required the use of three prescription medications to manage her disease, including the highly toxic methotrexate, a drug also used in cancer treatment and medical abortions. I met Wendy for an unrelated minor complaint of heart palpitations that proved to be benign, requiring no specific treatment. However, she told me that, because her ulcerative colitis was failing to respond to medications, her gastroenterologist advised colon removal with creation of an ileostomy. This is an artificial orifice for the small intestine (ileum) at the abdominal surface, the sort to which you affix a bag to catch the continually emptying stool. After hearing Wendy’s medical history, I urged her to try wheat elimination. “I really don’t know if it’s going to work,” I told her, “but since you’re facing colon removal and ileostomy, I think you should give it a try.” “But why?” she asked. “I’ve already been tested for celiac and my doctor said I don’t have it.” “Yes, I know. But you’ve got nothing to lose. Try it for four weeks. You’ll know if you’re responding.” Wendy was skeptical but agreed to try. She returned to my office three months later, no ileostomy bag in sight. “What happened?” I asked. “Well, first I lost thirty-eight pounds.” She ran her hand over her abdomen to show me. “And my ulcerative colitis is nearly gone. No more cramps or diarrhea. I’m off everything except my Asacol.” (Asacol is a derivative of aspirin often used to treat ulcerative colitis.) “I really feel great.” In the year since, Wendy has meticulously avoided wheat and gluten and has also eliminated the Asacol, with no return of symptoms. Cured. Yes, cured. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no cramps, no anemia, no more drugs, no ileostomy. So if Wendy’s colitis tested negative for celiac antibodies, but responded to—indeed, was cured by—wheat gluten elimination, what should we label it? Should we call it antibody-negative celiac disease? Antibody-negative wheat intolerance? There is great hazard in trying to pigeonhole conditions such as Wendy’s into something like celiac disease. It nearly caused her to lose her colon and suffer the lifelong health difficulties associated with colon removal, not to mention the embarrassment and inconvenience of wearing an ileostomy bag. There is not yet any neat name to fit conditions such as Wendy’s, despite its extraordinary response to the elimination of wheat gluten. Wendy’s experience highlights the many unknowns in this world of wheat sensitivities, many of which are as devastating as the cure is simple.

The journalist Stewart Alsop was confined to one such ward at the NIH in 1973 for the treatment of a rare and unidentifiable blood cancer. Crossing its threshold, he encountered a sanitized version of hell. "Wandering about the NIH clinical center, in the corridors or in the elevator, one comes occasionally on a human monster, on a living nightmare, on a face or body hideously deformed," he wrote. Patients, even disguised in "civilian" clothes, could still be identified by the orange tinge that chemotherapy left on their skin, underneath which lurked the unique pallor of cancer-related anemia. The space was limbolike, with no simple means of egress-no exit. In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.

Kristen never came home last night. Fuck, I shouldn’t have let her run off. I was just so shocked. It felt like she’d handed me a bomb and it detonated in my face, pelting me with emotional shrapnel. My ears had literally started to ring after what she’d said, and she’d bolted and jumped into the car of some girl she’d met during trivia, and she was gone in an instant. It happened so fast. I’d stayed up, waiting for her in her living room. Calling her cell phone, sending her text messages, begging her to come home and talk to me. She sent me a text around midnight saying only that she was okay, she wasn’t coming back, and to please walk the dog. Everything was finally clear. It all made sense. It was so obvious to me now I wondered how I couldn’t have known. The severe cramps, the spotting. Her history of anemia. The long periods. The walls she put between us. And all the fucked-up things I’ve said to her. That I wouldn’t adopt. That I wanted a huge family. That I’d left Celeste because she didn’t want children. Karaoke night suddenly looked totally different to me, the weeks after it where she’d gone cold—I’d told her that if Tyler didn’t want kids, she shouldn’t be with him. That the kid thing was too important. I’d actually told her that shit. I’d been talking Kristen out of dating me almost daily since the day I met her. Fuck, if only I’d known. I’d had all night to think about what it meant, and it didn’t change anything. I loved her. I couldn’t not be with her. That’s what it kept coming back to. I couldn’t walk away from her—I wasn’t even capable of it. The situation was fucked up and star-crossed, and I didn’t give a shit. She was the woman I loved, so we’d just have to deal with it.

One thousand dollars for processing and shipping. Then there are yearly storage fees. I know that may sound expensive, but this is a one-time opportunity. Cord blood contains stem cells that save lives. Simple as that. They can treat anemias and leukemias. They can fight infection and help with certain kinds of cancer.

Could these long years of peacetime be to blame for the fact that a new generation of politicians apparently believes we’ve now arrived at the end of history, making it possible to use violence to suppress all further movement and change? Or have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace — so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world — inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

The purpose of these tests is to check blood sugar control. The HgA1C test is the most accurate because it can give an average of your blood sugar levels over the past ninety days (the average life cycle of a red blood cell). You want your values to be between 4.8 and 5.2 percent (note anemia and dehydration can lead to falsely depressed or elevated levels). Fasting glucose is a onetime snapshot in the fasting state, of course, but should ideally be 70 to 85 mg/dl with a fasting insulin below 6 μIU/ml.