The Vitamin D Deficiency That Almost Broke Me
For the love of all that is good, please get your levels checked
Ahhhh, it’s that lovely time of the year when the sun sets at 4:30 pm after a long day of hiding behind the clouds. Thanks for nothing, you silly star!!
I know I’m not the only one who has a hard time adjusting to these short days with little-to-no sunlight. Even though I’ve lived in the Midwest for pretty much my entire life, winter always seems to catch me off guard for some reason.
But three years ago, things were a lot worse for me than they are now.
Back in 2020, I was still living in the suburbs of Milwaukee on a very busy road where traffic never stopped. The 750-square foot apartment I lived in was becoming cramped after Ryan (my then-boyfriend/now-fiancé) and I moved in together. We not only had to merge all of our stuff into one space, but we also had to create two separate work-from-home setups as the early Covid spread showed no signs of slowing down.
Almost every day in 2020 was an endless slog of office work, repetitive meals, and a few daily walks on the one path we had access to along the busy road. We rarely, if ever, went anywhere for fun that year, and our interactions with friends were limited to phone calls and small, masked gatherings. It was a depressing period of our lives, as I reckon it was for most people.
So when the winter came, it made sense that the cold air and lack of sunlight only worsened my constantly low mood. Obviously the first summer with Covid wasn’t peachy, but something about the changing seasons absolutely tanked my desire to keep existing.
I figured I just had seasonal depression, since for a lot of my young life I dealt with regular ‘ol depression on and off. My symptoms in the winter felt pretty much the same as normal depression symptoms.
None of the normal activities I enjoyed — crafts, cooking, trying takeout from new restaurants, going for hikes — really felt that exciting or interesting anymore. And every day, I’d wake up exhausted and would want nothing but to go back to sleep.
If it was a workday, I’d just trudge through my responsibilities and then go take a nap the minute I was off the clock. If it was a weekend, I’d sometimes sleep for 10 hours and then still want to take a nap in the middle of the day.
Tiredness and grumpiness were the only feelings I seemed capable of expressing. I remember one particular day when I woke groggy up on a weekend and said to Ryan, “ugh, I just know today is going to be horrible.” Having had enough of my shit (since I said stuff like this almost every day), he rolled his eyes and said, “no, it’s not. You literally just woke up.”
I really thought I’d feel crappy forever, but things changed when I went to see a new primary care doc early in 2021. She gave me a routine checkup and ordered bloodwork, the latter of which revealed that my vitamin D levels were drastically low.
Like, it was shocking. Healthy vitamin D levels are typically between 20-50 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml). Mine were around 12 ng/ml.
I was seriously low, and my doc gave me a ginormous pill to correct things. Ok, the pill wasn’t literally big, but the dose was crazy. It was 50,000 IUs in a single pill, which I took once per week. (A normal, over-the-counter vitamin D pill that you get at the pharmacy is typically 1000 to 3000 IUs.)
In the weeks that followed, my energy levels slowly crept back up to a point that felt almost unnatural to me. I wasn’t bouncing off the walls or anything, but I just felt way more awake and okay with life than I had in months. It was kinda like someone turned the lights back on in my brain.
I remember thinking to myself, that was it? That was the reason I felt like crap all this time? And for the most part, the answer was yes. Of course, there were some situational things I couldn’t change (ahem, Covid) that were still making me unhappy. But with my deficiency under control, life didn’t feel completely hopeless anymore.
I wanted to share this story because I hope it helps someone else. Obviously, you’re going to know your body and brain better than I do, but if you find yourself feeling abnormally lethargic, weak, and irritable during the winter, please, please go get your levels checked. At the very least go get your routine bloodwork done so that you can verify that you have perfect vitamin D levels and are better than everyone else (kidding, kidding).
When I first learned I was vitamin D deficient, I thought I was a bit of an anomaly. But it’s actually an extremely common condition. It’s estimated that 50 percent of all people on Earth have insufficient levels of vitamin D, which is higher than being deficient, but still not at normal/optimal levels.
Living further from the equator can set you up for it, since people in northern and southernmost regions of Earth just experience less sunlight throughout the year. But even in places that are a lot more warm and sunny than where I live, people’s vitamin D levels can tank due to all kinds of factors: clothing choices, dietary preferences, and indoor lifestyles, to name a few.
I was surprised to learn that even in countries close to the equator, like India and Saudi Arabia, people still struggle to get enough of this essential vitamin. Some are more at risk for a deficiency than others, as a pretty wide-ranging research review on different populations in India outlined in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.
Folks living in cities, for example, generally had a higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency — around 90 percent in some cases. I can imagine that has a lot to do with the amount of time spent indoors or on public transit, for starters.
Skin color can play a role, too. If you have darker skin, you’ll generally need to absorb more sunlight to make the same amount of vitamin D as someone with lighter skin. That can at least partially explain why some of the highest rates of vitamin D deficiency in the U.S. are among Black Americans.
The craziest thing to me is how easy vitamin D deficiencies are to treat. My understanding is that it’s pretty standard course for docs to give their patients a huge dose of vitamin D for a few weeks (called a loading dose) and then instruct them to keep their levels up with over-the-counter supplements. I can only speak for myself, but that regimen worked perfectly.
I’d venture to guess that many of us go through life not even knowing we don’t produce enough vitamin D. It’s easy to ignore or get the symptoms confused with something else — like in my case, depression.
But when you do figure it out and address it, the change can be drastic. Like night and day.
I used to dread winter, and while I still kinda hate it, I know it won’t take every fiber of my being to just get through the season. Now I can at least look forward to eating holiday cookies and seeing the festive lights (while eagerly counting down the days til spring).