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Please STOP trying to raise your ferritin with iron pills if your periods are heavy. I know that sounds insane coming from a nurse. But I did this to myself for years before I understood what was actually wrong. My ferritin had been sitting in single digits for years. And I felt every point of it. By mid-afternoon my body felt like it was filled with cement. I could sleep ten hours and wake up feeling like I hadn't slept at all. My hair was coming out in the shower in handfuls that scared me. The tub was clogging every time I washed it. I could see my scalp through my part, and I dreaded brushing it because it felt like everything just let go at once. My heart would pound just carrying laundry up the stairs. And every single month, like clockwork, all of it would get worse around my period. The shedding would spike. The exhaustion would hit a new floor. I'd barely start to recover before the next one came and knocked me straight back down. So I did what any nurse would do. I started treating it. Ferrous sulfate. Every day, with vitamin C, never with my coffee. The exact protocol I'd told hundreds of patients to follow. And it destroyed me. The constipation, the cramping, bloating so bad I looked six months pregnant. I pushed through all of it because I thought that's what it took. I retested after months of misery and watched my ferritin crawl up two or three points. Still losing hair. Still exhausted. Still a shell of myself. And the part that ate at me most: I'm a nurse. If anyone should have been able to fix this, it was me. I couldn't. Then one month my period hit so hard I had to call in sick. And when I retested a couple weeks after, my ferritin had actually gone down. I sat there staring at the result and something clicked — If a patient was losing blood every month and the replacement wasn't keeping up, you wouldn’t increase the dose. You’d change the approach. I was that patient. I'd been that patient for years. That night I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed, sat at my kitchen table with my laptop, and for the first time I started looking at my problem like a nurse would. And what I found made me furious. Ferrous sulfate (the cheap stuff every doctor reaches for, the exact thing I was taking) only absorbs at about 15%. The rest just sits in your gut, which is precisely where the constipation and the bloating come from. Iron bisglycinate - a chelated form that absorbs around four times better, without destroying the gut - has been studied for years. And doctors are still handing out ferrous sulfate like nothing's changed. I kept reading. And here’s where it got worse. Every period pulls a real, measurable amount of iron out of your body. So if your periods are heavy, you're losing a serious chunk every single month, like clockwork. So taking these iron pills is like trying to fill a bucket that empties itself every few weeks. But that still wasn't the full picture. The studies show that your body needs specific cofactors to lock iron into storage as ferritin: vitamin C, B6, B12, copper. Without them, absorbed iron has nowhere to go. I pulled up every supplement I'd ever taken. Not one of them had the cofactors. That was three things working against my ferritin — iron pills that barely absorbed, no cofactors to support the iron, and a heavy period draining it every month. So I stopped looking for more iron pills, and started looking for something that could keep up with my period. One that filled up my ferritin faster than it drained, and could help my body hold on to the ferritin. That night, after a few hours searching I found a formula that had everything in one place. Iron bisglycinate at a clinical dose. Vitamin C, B6, B12 and copper to actually store it. And two things I'd never seen in an iron supplement before. Lactoferrin, which drives iron into storage, and L-lysine, which has been shown to raise ferritin specifically in women who never responded to iron alone. The full pathway finally made sense to me. I ordered it that night. And then I did the most nurse thing imaginable and kept a log. Week 2. Stomach felt fine. No cramping, no constipation, none of the misery I'd braced for. After everything ferrous sulfate had done to me, I almost didn't trust it. Week 4. The afternoon crash lifted. I got through a full day without needing to lie down — the first time in longer than I can remember. The heavy cement feeling started easing out of my body, and the stairs stopped leaving me breathless. Week 6. I washed my hair and barely anything came out in the drain. I checked twice. I wasn't dreading the shower anymore. Week 8. New growth coming in along my hairline. The shedding had almost completely stopped. Week 12. I got retested. Ferritin: 74. From 9 to 74 in twelve weeks — after years of iron that never moved it more than a point or two. And I feel like a completely different person. My hair - I can run my fingers through it without a handful coming away, and the gaps around my part are filling back in. I recognize myself in the mirror again. The exhaustion that made my body feel like cement? Gone. I've got energy I'd forgotten I was supposed to have, and the stairs don't leave me breathless anymore. My periods are still heavy but for the first time, my body can actually keep up with them. And I'm not the only one. I see women like me every week — heavy periods draining them month after month, taking iron that was never going to keep up, blaming themselves when it doesn't work. I used to not say anything. I do now. But I'm still furious. Because in 16 years of nursing, nothing I was ever taught connected heavy periods to why iron fails. And when a woman bleeds through her clothes and can't get off the couch, the system calls it Tuesday. I learned that the hard way. You don't have to. I've linked what I take below: https://nivara-shop.com/products/ferravital-ferritin-support Don't waste another month pouring iron into a bucket your period empties every few weeks. Don't spend another year thinking you're the problem. You're not. You never were. --- P.S. — Every month I stayed on ferrous sulfate was a month my period wiped out whatever iron got through, while my hair thinned and my energy disappeared. If I'd found bisglycinate and the cofactors to store it sooner, I'd have those years back. P.P.S. — Two weeks for the fog to lift. Five weeks for the shedding to slow. Eight weeks for the cement to clear. That was my timeline. If your ferritin's been stuck and your periods are heavy, your body isn't broken. It just never had what it needed to keep up.