Lair of Flying Green Song Rabbits

As I sit here about to type out a post about a trip to The Athenian and uploading photos, I change my mind. Instead I'm going to talk about something that briefly entered my thoughts last week.

Currently in Biochemistry class we have been learning about different types of cancers and what causes them to occur + how to treat them. I have no idea why we're doing this in 3rd year of Nutrition (and why it is so god damn hard too...). Anyway one slide in the lecture particularly stood out to me. It was a family tree of a family who had familial cancer through five generations. The cancer were of several different types that struck over half of the males and females of the family. It is a particularly sad genetic disease called Li-Fraumeni syndrome which increases your susceptibility to cancer. At the time friends and I joked those people should not reproduce as everyone suffers with the grief of losing family/chance of getting cancer and financial and emotional burden. Do you guys think these people should reproduce?

I guess the lecture coincided with the same week I went to the doctors to get my blood test result back and found yet another thing wrong with me; I thought to myself god I shouldn't be allowed to reproduce either.

So apparently I have Vitamin D deficiency too now. WTF? I swear I get sun exposure but apparently my blood levels of vitamin D puts me at medium deficiency and I have to take vitamin D tablets now... I dont want oesteoporosis when I'm old =( And low Vit D levels have been implicated in cancers and loads of other diseases.

Also I'm so used to my blood test results now coming back littered with asteriks that it wasn't a suprise my haemoglobin levels are low due to my low iron stores. My doctor now classifies me as chronically low iron levels. CHRONIC?? He told me to get more iron tablets or face iron injections every month which I would really not like... I hate the iron tablets though as they give me terrible stomach pangs sometimes and as a side effect constipation due to the very high iron dose. Today however I decided to put my nutrition skills to use and bought myself a bottle of liquid iron solution that is lower in iron and hoping it will work (If it does, suck that doctor. Pfft injections, my nutrition skills beat yours! lol)

The good news though is that my pre-diabetes is under control and apparently I "no longer have it." The doctor said I was probably just on a diet that was too high in carbohydrates. I'm still going to try and watch what I eat though to make sure I'm not one step into the door again.

So to sum up. I have low iron levels, this is really important in pregnant women for reasons I can't remember wtf. Also since I've always had chronically low levels that don't seem to get better I could just have bad absorption... Also low vitamin D levels in a mother can cause bad bone development (Rickets) in babies as not enough transfer to baby. My pre-diabetes before could lead to gestational diabetes when I'm pregnant which may mean caesarean birth that's been related to many other problems in babies. As well as this I have the body of a 10 year old with not wide enough child bearing hips lol. And I'm a frail short asian =( Coupled with I don't have enough beauty or brains genes to pass on, I don't think I should ever have kids.

Lol I'm kidding I still like kids =). I am however planning to take control of my health. Nothing I have is life threatening but they do decrease quality of life. Constantly feeling tired is not something I'm very fond of especially as an already sleep deprived uni student. So I'm going to test out what Iron formulation work for me, get plenty of sun in spring/summer and eat healthily (with desserts...). I've transferred all my medical files and stuff from my parents to my own filing cabinent and I now go to the doctors myself with my own medicare card and pay myself (I feel so grown up at 20 and finally going to the doctors on my own lol). Wish me luck =)

Sorry for the self absorbed, pity myself post. Taking medicine makes me sad =(((. I'll post The Athenian pictures soon =)!