Blue Water
Member
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2020
- Messages
- 268
I have been having issues since getting covid back in March 2020. It caused my iron saturation in the blood to skyrocket (up to 72% at its worst), while my ferritin dropped about twenty points, settling eventually at somewhere between 30-34 ng/dl. So while I am not anywhere near iron toxic in tissues, I am definitely overloaded in the blood.
My doctors, seeing I had one variant for hemochromatosis, advised conservative blood-letting a couple times a year. I gave blood recently and there was a serious difference in color between my blood and others. I had noticed this on routine blood draws recently as well. My blood is like a black color. It's very disturbing to me. They murmured "probably because of the iron."
However, in googling the subject further I stumbled on a condition called "methenoglobinemia." In this condition, hemoglobin contains iron which is oxidized in the blood to a state that is unable to carry oxygen into the cells. If the body has too much of this form of hemoglobin, you basically have hypoxia symptoms. Blue skin, headaches, fatigue, nausea, coma, etc. I may have very slight symptoms of these but nothing severe. Chronic methemoglobinemia however can actually produce very little symptoms – I guess the body becomes accustomed to it somehow.
I'm wondering if anyone has had experiences like this or knows what could be causing it. This is all confusing to me. The cure is methylene blue or vitamin C, but methylene blue seems risky for G6pD deficient individuals (I don't know if I am G6PD deficient) so I would have to figure that out. Is it possible that it is caused by the iron or something else?
Thanks
My doctors, seeing I had one variant for hemochromatosis, advised conservative blood-letting a couple times a year. I gave blood recently and there was a serious difference in color between my blood and others. I had noticed this on routine blood draws recently as well. My blood is like a black color. It's very disturbing to me. They murmured "probably because of the iron."
However, in googling the subject further I stumbled on a condition called "methenoglobinemia." In this condition, hemoglobin contains iron which is oxidized in the blood to a state that is unable to carry oxygen into the cells. If the body has too much of this form of hemoglobin, you basically have hypoxia symptoms. Blue skin, headaches, fatigue, nausea, coma, etc. I may have very slight symptoms of these but nothing severe. Chronic methemoglobinemia however can actually produce very little symptoms – I guess the body becomes accustomed to it somehow.
I'm wondering if anyone has had experiences like this or knows what could be causing it. This is all confusing to me. The cure is methylene blue or vitamin C, but methylene blue seems risky for G6pD deficient individuals (I don't know if I am G6PD deficient) so I would have to figure that out. Is it possible that it is caused by the iron or something else?
Thanks