Exhaustion

I have been extremely exhausted since Friday.  I feel like a zombie walking around.  My husband keeps asking me if I am mad at him because it takes too much effort for me to talk to him.  He is not used to the silence from me.

I've taken a lot of naps.  I've been sleeping over 8 hours a night which is pretty unusual for me.  It's really screwing up my eating and pill taking time table.  I missed a meal completely on Friday.  I took at nap at 5:45 after I finished my 3rd meal of the day.  I slept until 10 PM.  So I got up, spent the next two hours taking the pills I considered most important, then went back to bed.  And I had no problem going back to sleep despite my long nap.

Maybe I am anemic as my first period since surgery started this past Wednesday.  I felt fine until Friday and nothing has changed except this.  I don't think I am depressed.  I'm not sad, angry, or even apathetic.  I care, I'm just too tired to do anything about it.  The past two days I've been hitting high iron foods hard.  Oatmeal, beef, beans, chicken, turkey.  Pretty much in that order.

Just this evening I started to consider that perhaps I am not getting enough salt in my diet.  Fatigue is also a symptom of hyponatremia (low blood salt).  I normally don't salt anything I cook.  That would be most of the meats I've been eating.  So using myfitnesspal.com, I looked at the record of my salt intake over the past 30 days.  It ranges from 850 mg to 1300 mg, with an average of 1070 mg for the past 21 days.  From Google:

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend an upper limit for sodium consumption of 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day for adults. If you are African American, age 51 or older or have high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic disease, that recommendation is lowered to 1,500 milligrams per day.

So perhaps I'm too low in that.  I honestly don't know.  I just know I'm tired.  And when I get more talkative, I'm cranky.  My husband is not too please to be around me right now.

I don't have any blood work done to test my levels for 3 more weeks.  I guess I'll just hang in there for now.  Try to eat a little more salt and keep up on eating the iron-y foods. Now, I'm off to bed.