Vitamins - Open invitation

Thank you Andrea.  No matter how much flack you get from people for telling it like you see it...you're always there reaching out to help any of us who've ever asked for it. 

I just got my blood work done today to check my labs (haven't done them for a year because I'm on the 'annual check up' phase now, but I take my vits religiously).  I have a new dr now  - my 'regular' dr just transferred to Lagos, Nigeria, a few months ago...and the dr today called to tell me she didn't see a need to do anything but the zinc & vit D tests, because my iron is good - 12.5 she said - so didn't want to test the B12, Calcium, or anything else, because 'if the iron is good, everything else is too!'  I don't know how reliable that tidbit of advice is...but at my insistence, she's testing everything else anyways, just because I don't want any nasty surprises somewhere down the road because I didn't test since my 'iron was good.'

On an uneducated side note...I see on the R&R board about your headaches, etc.  Is there any connection with your vits being tanked into the basement and your headaches?  Just wondering, since you said your levels are so low...and I know from reading your posts how bad your headaches are.

Get your own labs and put your own eyeballz upon them.  Track trends -- stop deficiencies before they get low.

And her tidbit sucks.  Calcium has absolutely nothing to do with iron -- and neither does D.  If your D is low, then you can be losing bone mass -- but your iron can be great.  So no, her tidbit isn't worth listening to whatsoever.

What she probably is trying to say is that if your iron is good, it might mean your B12 is probably fine (b-12 deficiency can lead to a form of anemia), but this isn't always true, either.

This is why you need to look at your own labs and see what is going on with your blood.


And alas, no -- I had headaches and migraines long before WLS came about.  I was diagnosed with migraines back in the early 2000's.

I thought it was a screwy tidbit too...because if it was that easy to tell if everything was OK, then why would the WLS drs ask for everything else in the first place?  I'll probably get the results in next week.  I don't anticipate any major changes...but I do do the blood work on a regular basis just to make sure.  It was part of the mental agreement I made with myself when deciding on the surgery.  Had to go give them more blood this morning since she hadn't had them take enough yesterday since she hadn't planned on doing all the blood work that's on the list.

Too bad the migraines aren't connected to the deficiencies.  Then the logic would be fix the deficiency, fix the headaches. 

Don't have any numbers yet but heres what I picked up at GNC yesterday.

GNC chewable multi vitamin
GNC chewable calcium plus 600 w/ D3
GNC vitamin C
GNC Liquid B complex

Vitamins must be key to good health because my grandmother is 74, works full time as a CNA at a nursing home (so she is constantly moving) no lie weighs 95 pounds (not that, that is healthy) but she takes about 20 vitamins a day and rarely eats anything and she is freaking healthiest woman I know.

I'm guessing that chewable calcium is calcium carbonate, which isn't bioavailable in an RNY gut.  We need calcium citrate -- which is not as easily available without going on the internet.  There is a GREAT lemon flavored citrate out there -- I know cause I practically scarfed some up like candy (and is percisely the point why I won't be buying them as my main calcium source)..  and others available..  But citrate is what we need.

That B-complex also probably doesn't have B12.  Most don't.  Also, check to see if it has B1 (Thiamin) -- some don't have that, either.


You might need to think about iron -- we'll see after you get some *ahem* labs drawn.

The B-Complex does have B-12 actually a good amount (dont have right here but checked while I was home). The calcium was what the lady gave me at GNC, I did say citrate, she said "it has citrate in it". So I don't know if that is good or not. About the labs, I called my surgeon yesterday because I see them on 11/30, she said they will give me a lab slip when I go to my appointment I said that I wanted to get it done before so that I can talk to the Dr. about it while I am there, then if something is wrong we can fix it right away. These people are making me really mad.

You don't need your surgeon to interpret your labs.  That's what you have a brain for.  Well and the internet.

centrum chewable once a day
biotin   twice a day
calcium citrate +d twice a day
prenatal once a day
b-12 sublingual once a day
promitrum once a day

I'd think about some iron (tends to tank quickly in pregnancy), up your calcium (you're not getting too much in the grand scheme of things), and another multivitamin (with your malabsorption, you're only getting about 50% of the RDA of most of the things in it).