I had kind of a weird time in my first year of university. I made some amazing friends and had some amazing adventures, but all of that was eclipsed in the spring of second semester, when I started to feel exhausted—all the time. Just walking to class felt like my bones were heavy pieces of wood I was dragging through wet sand. I felt like there were weights wrapped around each of my joints. I spent more and more time in bed, and missed more and more lectures. I started avoiding parties, too. I didn’t feel like seeing anyone because making conversation required so much focus and effort. I would eat in the cafeteria at times I knew it would be empty, because I suddenly had no patience for waiting for anything: lines, buses, tutorials to end. My attention span had shrivelled to zero, and so had my manners. I would walk out on a class discussion in a group of 12 people five minutes after getting there if I thought it was boring. I also started getting sick all the time. I couldn’t be around someone who had a cold without catching it, so I became one of those terrible people who refused to meet you for coffee if you had a sore throat. And once I caught something, it was ages before I was better.

I had no idea what was going on, and so I spent several weeks dragging myself back and forth in the rain (I lived in Vancouver, so yes, always in the rain) to the campus doctor, answering the run of the mill university health centre questions (Pregnant? Mono? STI?) and getting blood tests. When they finally called back with the results, it turned out I had anemia caused by iron deficiency.

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was six, and like many people, my diet changed radically in my first year of university. The result was the upset of some careful, though unintentional, balance that resulted in a lot less iron in my diet. I had never been careful about what I ate, and as I lost energy, I ate (and cared) even less than before. Iron deficiency anemia is the most common form of anemia. It can occur because your body is not absorbing iron properly or you are not eating foods with enough iron in them (hi hello 19-year-old Haley stop subsisting solely on veggie wraps, chips, and Lucky Charms), and is also a side effect of many other conditions, from pregnancy to Crohn’s Disease to cancer.

I was lucky: there was nothing more serious going on than low iron levels (mine were hovering just above the level at which you need to be hospitalized). As the semester wrapped up, I jumped through some bureaucratic hoops to get doctor’s notes for as many classes as I could, resulting in a delightful series of withdrawal Ws on my transcripts. Some profs were extremely understanding, others were not. I failed a class, something I had never, ever done before. I may have had enough pride to try and learn an entire year’s worth of skipped Italian classes in a week when the prof inferred I was faking sick, but I didn’t have the energy to be mad at myself when it didn’t work. It was strange to see the effect this had had on my personality. I went from being someone for whom failing wasn’t an option to being someone who couldn’t care less if I did.

My indifference wasn’t helped by the fact that doctors, especially at university health centres, can be brusque and dismissive. Ditto for profs who have heard a ridiculous spectrum of excuses for missing class. When you’re already not feeling well, it can be hard to push them to help you, but it’s worth it. If you’re dealing with a health issue while you’re in school, I can’t stress enough the importance of getting doctor’s notes, communicating with profs, and doing your administrative due diligence to ensure you don’t lose credits and money. 

After the dust had settled, I started taking iron pills every day, and felt better almost immediately. My energy returned, and suddenly I was excited to go out and see people and do the things I always enjoyed doing. Slowly but surely, the haze everything had slipped into lifted. I had felt like I was in a fishtank, and the world was happening around me while I floated, indifferent and unable to really reach the outside. Getting my iron back up was like bursting up above the surface again.