Well, in my case, Meloxicam, my arthritis medication, looks to be the culprit. I laid off it for a couple if weeks, them had my blood drawn today, and everything is back to normal. Have already changed to another medication.
Just in time too. The wife was halfway thinking I was dying, because her mother became anemic, then ended up dying of leukemia.
For those following along, my next blood draw is tomorrow.
And all is good. The iron supplements did the trick. I will go down from three pills a day to one pill a day and do another blood draw in six more weeks.
Glad you’re doing better, and your problem was uncomplicated.
So my anemia is creeping back. Very mild. My PCP was going to refer me to a hematologist, but I got a call back from an oncologist’s office. Hmm. Well, we’ll see. Don’t have an appointment yet.
Not quite so ominous after all. Seems the good doctor is both an oncologist and a hematologist. I’ll see him next month in his capacity as the latter.
I’m glad it’s not so scary.
Oncology and hematology are a bundled specialty. Not sure why.
I’m guessing due to leukemia.
I believe it’s because hematologists were the first oncologists insofar as they were the first to use chemotherapy (i.e. in acute lymphoblastic leukemia History of cancer chemotherapy - Wikipedia).
When I go in for my blood and iron infusions they send me to the UNC Cancer Hospital. The unit has somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 stations; some of them are individual rooms but most of them are just curtained-off areas with recliners. Judging from the traffic flow when I’ve been there, some of the patients are getting chemotherapy and some are getting blood/iron like me.
Mine was minor and seemed to be caused by frequent blood donation. Every eight weeks at work like clockwork for over a year. One Friday before yet another donation, the Red Cross tested my iron levels. There was some consternation and I was retested. Then, a supervisor was called in. He asked how I felt, which was just fine. They approved me to give blood and I did. The next day, I did my routine lab work for a checkup and it came up iron deficient. I told my doctor that I had donated blood the day before. She said that that shouldn’t have skewed the iron result because the time between donation and the lab testing was so short that my blood volume wouldn’t have yet recovered. I must have been anemic when I donated. With iron supplements, I recovered in a couple of months and it never recurred after I stopped donating.
My father’s severe anemia was caused by colon polyps. He never saw blood in his stool either but by the time he sought treatment, he was somewhere between yellow and gray in color, couldn’t walk more than 15 feet without resting, and required four transfusions in three days of hospitalization.