From a release:
LANTZ: “I’ve been anemic for almost 40 years,” said Diana Tibert of East Hants and author of Fluid of Life.
“In my teens, low blood may have shown up on the simple blood test the nurse did at the high school blood drive, but I didn’t feel any symptoms. In fact, I had energy to burn. I was as healthy as a horse.”
Anemia is the most common blood disorder, and more than 1.1 million people in Canada have it. The condition results when there’s lack of healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen throughout the body. When blood is tested for red blood cells, it shows up on results as hemoglobin. For women, the normal level is between 120 g/L and 160 g/L. Anything lower, and the person has anemia.
What Tibert didn’t know as a teen was that living with anemia was not a life-long option. After giving birth to two children, breastfeeding both, her energy waned in her mid-30s. Adding a third child to the already run-down system, she felt the symptoms of anemia. Yet, blood tests revealed her hemoglobin was the same if not a few digits higher than when she first became pregnant at the age of 29.
She blamed her tired body on long days with three young children, working as a freelance writer and everything else a busy life brings. “I thought if I could only get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at night, I’d catch up, but I never did.”
When she took a seasonal job outside the home, tired turned into exhaustion, and she found herself getting behind the wheel and fearful she’d fall asleep within five minutes of driving.
Wondering if something was horribly wrong, she got blood work done. Everything was fine. The doctor told her she was anemic, which she knew, and to take iron pills, which she couldn’t because they caused painful constipation.
“In my head, my thoughts bounced between I’m perfectly health because the doctor said so to I think something is horribly wrong and the doctor missed it”
Fluid of Life shares the connection between anemia and her slow but consistent slide to the bottom of a well that should never run dry. Through brief tales of an active, healthy life before children, she compares how she felt in her teens and 20s to how she felt in her late 30s and into her 40s.
“Fluid of Life is my experience with anemia,” she writes. “Anemia is not life-threatening… unless it goes unmonitored and it lasts for decades. I didn’t know that until a friend ended up in hospital for treatment.”
That’s when she understood living with anemia wasn’t an option. It was time to start living with the amount of blood her body needed to survive and thrive.
With Fluid of Life, she hopes to inspire other women to take control of their blood health. By sharing the knowledge she’s gained in the past 25 years from doctors, nurses, friends and personal research, it provides readers with questions they didn’t know to ask, tests they might not know about and basic common sense information that sometimes isn’t so obvious.
While much of the information in this book should be common knowledge and provided to patients with anemia, it’s not. Tibert wants to change that.
The target readers for this book are women in their mid-40s who have had children. They’re the ones most likely to be running dangerously low on blood. That’s when Tibert dipped into the danger zone of anemia.
She shows and explains the numbers on blood tests and what the doctors she had over the years didn’t tell her. She also gives tips and information to help improve blood production to regain energy, which affects all aspects of life.
Fluid of Life was published by Quarter Castle Publishing and is available as an eBook and paperback at Amazon (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09ZBG6FVV). The book is available to Kindle Unlimited members.
Tibert’s opening quote in the book sums it up: If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?
