As I may or may not have mentioned in previous blogs, it came out at some point that I was anaemic. I had not been told this and the way I was told wasn’t really acceptable so the whole thing has made me really rather grumpy. I wasn’t given any type of advice on treating this and was kind of just left to my own devices (despite asking a number of times).
I spoke to my Nutritionist about it and we agreed that it was probably a good idea for me to take a test for a large range of vitamins and nutrient levels. This would mean that we would have a good idea of what we were trying to achieve and what I needed to be eating or if i needed to be taking anything to compensate. My Nutritionist recommended a nutrient test called Thriva and organised for me to be sent one through the website.
It arrived in the morning but I couldnt do it until the next day as I had already had breakfast and you have to fast for at least 8 hours before completing the test. So I waited until the next day, opened the box and set about completing my blood sample.
Now I am notoriously difficult to get blood out of most weeks and I was therefore not looking forward to this however I was pleasantly surprised!
The test comes with a small test tube to put your blood into, three finger prick thingies, some anti-bacterial and cleansing wipes, two plasters and the appropriate stickers and envelopes to send off your sample.
The encourage you to drink a lot of water to make it easier, so I drank two pints of water before I started, then reading the instructions I had to prick my finger with the thingies provided and drop the blood that came out into the test tube (which had a handy little holder in the kit too). Now this was where it started to get a little bit interesting, because apparently I do bleed from my finger tips… quite a lot as the case is! I basically bled everywhere and it looked slightly like a small scale massacre on the white table that I was completing the test on.
I filled the test tube, labelled it all up, stuck it in the envelope and sent it off! Now I am waiting on the results and hope that these will come from my Nutritionist! Hopefully this will be the turning point as I will really know what is going on with my nutrients, it will certainly be interesting to look at!