Sometimes your body is asking for something. You just haven’t learnt its language yet.

She came in for what was meant to be an ordinary check-up, just to understand what was going on in her body. There were barely any real complaints — but her skin had a yellowish tinge, mornings were hard, her head felt foggy and forgetful, and she had almost no energy on long study days and night shifts. And one particular request: to raise her iron without intravenous drips.

When I looked at her labs, I saw a severe iron deficiency — ferritin around 6 — yet her haemoglobin was perfectly normal. That’s the key point: this was iron deficiency, not anaemia, so her haemoglobin always looked fine and the problem had been overlooked for years. Ferritin simply isn’t part of a standard check-up, and low iron doesn’t show on haemoglobin alone. Her folate, B12 and total protein were low too. The cause was old and simple: years of heavy periods without enough iron and protein to replace the loss.

I didn’t chase a single number — I put the whole picture together. Iron by mouth, exactly as she’d asked, no drips, alongside its cofactors and B-vitamins. We paused the iron during her period. We added quality protein at every meal, glycine-rich foods like rich meat and bone broth, gentle support for her gut, and far less sugar.

In about eight months her ferritin climbed from 6 to 60 — on oral iron and food alone, without a single drip. Her energy and clarity were transformed. In her own words, “life before and after”.

She came to me with heavy sweating and dry, darkened elbows, and a wish to finally understand what was happening in her body. But the most important thing lay ahead: she was preparing for pregnancy.

We went through her labs together to see what was behind the symptoms and to get her body ready for pregnancy. I wrote her a personal nutrition plan, chose the vitamins she needed, and gave her a recipe collection so cooking well felt easy — even enjoyable — every day.

Within a couple of weeks of eating the new way, the sweating and the odour eased, the bad breath went, the bloating and the little stomach pains she used to just put up with disappeared, and her elbows grew softer and lighter. And the most important result of all — a positive pregnancy test in September 2025.

Her first bout of cystitis was five years ago. After that it would come and go, but the fear that it might return never left her. Intimacy frightened her most: to feel safe she’d take uroseptics before and after, and knock back each flare-up with antibiotics. She lived permanently on guard. And alongside it ran so much more — anxiety, tiredness, low mood, stomach cramps at the smallest stress, and sugar cravings she just couldn’t rein in.

We didn’t treat the bladder in isolation — I looked at her as a whole person. The acute flare was treated properly, of course, with a doctor and lab tests. But then I wrote her a calm, detailed plan: how to eat, how to support herself (magnesium included), what to do about stress and her stomach, and which habits to change around intimacy and hygiene — so flare-ups would happen less often, rather than putting them out each time once they’d already caught hold.

The flare-ups stopped. For the first time in five years she stopped taking uroseptics “just in case” — and stopped being afraid. The anxiety and the exhausting mood swings lifted, her stomach stopped hurting, her appetite and sleep came back, and the sugar cravings faded on their own. Her cycle passed without tears for the first time. She wrote to tell me even her dreams had turned vivid, like little stories.