Tiredness in Pregnancy

I'm just entering my third trimester of pregnancy and boy did the tiredness ever hit me!  I have been finding that by 10 am I'm pretty exhausted and by 1 pm I definitely need a nap.  It's school holidays here, our big long summer ones so having two little ones at home as well makes it a challenge.  Thankfully my husband was home for a week and a half over Christmas and I slept.  A lot.  But I was starting to get worried about what would happen when he returned to work because I literally could not stay awake.

Thankfully I had a midwife appointment just before New Year's.  I had done my 28 week blood tests and glucose screening the day before and she had the results.  My iron levels were low - they were at 4 and my midwife said normal was 20.  After looking at Dr Google, I learned that anemia is anything lower than 11.  No wonder I was so tired!!  My midwife said she was surprised I could even get out of bed in the morning but to be honest, I just thought it was regular pregnancy related tiredness.  And that's the thing with pregnancy, it's hard to know what's 'normal' and what's not.  I just assumed that since this is my third child and I'm a bit older, it's just more tiring.  There are other side effects as well such as grumpiness but again I figured that was just my hormones kicking in.  One other thing that I found curious was that I was craving ice chips, and apparently this is a side-effect as well.  But with so many weird cravings in pregnancy, again I thought it was just par for the course.

So that brings me to writing this.  It was a reminder to me to be vigilant about my health and I wanted to pass my story along in case it can help someone else.  See I had kept telling my midwife I was tired and she would just nod empathetically and say pregnancy is tiring.  There was no further discussion about it being anything more than that.  I think it's great that we have these regular blood tests so that it was caught, but I also wonder if it could have been caught sooner.  For my levels to have gotten so low, it must have taken some time!

Now that I've started taking iron tablets, my energy has returned and although I'm still a bit tired come the afternoon, I can definitely see the difference between low-iron tired and regular pregnancy and life tired.  Before I was always exhausted no matter how much I slept. And I slept a LOT!  So if you are pregnant and feel lethargic, might be worth getting it checked out.

A week after starting the tablets and I feel great!  I'm so happy because I was getting so bored.  I'm not one for sitting around much and doing nothing and the nesting phase has just kicked in so I was keen to get things sorted.  I was so bummed thinking it would be 10 more weeks of this kind of tiredness, but thankfully the tablets help and I feel so much better!

Hopefully none of you will have to go through this, though it is fairly common I hear.  Just something to be aware of so I thought I'd share.  Take care of yourself!
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