The Iron Gong Show

If any of you were alarmed by the reports of iron deficiency in my recent post, don't worry. It was a false alarm.

Well, it wasn't entirely false, but the sense of alarm isn't there anymore.

If you remember the chronology of the past week, you will recall that R went in for some blood work last week, received a call from the doctor's office on Sunday that she should begin regular (and substantial) doses of an iron supplement, and then came back for a follow-up appointment today.

The main source of consternation for us was the lack of information on Sunday. The person who called from the doctor's office gave scant details about R's required supplement, saying only that she needed 300mg, twice daily, of something called POLIFER. R asked him to spell it, and P-O-L-I-F-E-R is what she got. She asked what POLIFER was, but the caller could provide no additional information except that it was an iron supplement.

After considerable searching on the internet, and thanks to Google's heuristic search capabilities, we realized that the product was actually called PALAFeR. We also learned that 300mg of PALAFeR has 100mg of elemental iron in it, which is a pretty hefty dose. Normally, a pregnant woman needs about 28mg of iron in a day, and R was already taking that much. The impression we got from all this was that R had anemia, and needed a lot of iron. She consulted with a pharmacist, who said that it should be okay to take that much iron. Fine.

During today's appointment, the doctor reconfirmed the need to take 300mg of PALAFeR -- now referred to in our home as Falafel (see picture), because of the miscommunications. Then she looked at another test result, and did an about-face. She said that R has high enough levels of Ferritin that she should absorb and store iron quite well, so she should just be sure to eat lots of iron-rich foods... like Falafel.

If anybody needs some iron supplements, let us know. We've got extra.