The Pregnant Mother Runner Podcast
Aug 4, 2026 · 29 min · 10 segments
It’s the final week of the second trimester, and things finally feel like they are calming down a little… even though I know the third-trimester countdown is about to begin. This week, I’m sharing…
Serena MarieHost
I did get labs checked and it did come back that I have some signs of iron deficiency.
My iron and my hemoglobin are still within normal limits, although they're low normal.
But something that's really important for us to know as pregnant women who have to really advocate for ourselves, because I do think a lot of healthcare practitioners are not great about knowing this, is iron and hemoglobin are like the last things to get when you're kind of entering iron deficiency anemia.
Our body really tries to protect you from having low iron or having low hemoglobin, which is essentially...
the part of the red blood cell that's going to be carrying that oxygen to your cells.
And so, um, we really don't want to only look at those because those are like the last, um, the last things to fail.
And we really want to kind of look at what else is going on in the body or the systems that are in place to protect those things from feeling, are they thriving? I'm trying to think of an analogy.
It would be like if someone was robbing a bank and they haven't broken into the safe yet.
And you're a police officer and you're looking at video footage of for some reason.
But you see actively there's gunned men in there trying to rob the bank and are putting the bank tellers in a closet so that they can go and raid the bank.
But because you see the money is in the safe, you're like, oh, pish posh applesauce, we're fine.
And that's kind of, I think, how our healthcare system like approaches iron labs where there'll be like, oh, your iron is fine.
Like I'm usually like robustly towards like the higher end, but they don't know that about me.
I did get labs checked and it did come back that I have some signs of iron deficiency.
My iron and my hemoglobin are still within normal limits, although they're low normal.
But something that's really important for us to know as pregnant women who have to really advocate for ourselves, because I do think a lot of healthcare practitioners are not great about knowing this, is iron and hemoglobin are like the last things to get when you're kind of entering iron deficiency anemia.
Our body really tries to protect you from having low iron or having low hemoglobin, which is essentially...
the part of the red blood cell that's going to be carrying that oxygen to your cells.
And so, um, we really don't want to only look at those because those are like the last, um, the last things to fail.
And we really want to kind of look at what else is going on in the body or the systems that are in place to protect those things from feeling, are they thriving? I'm trying to think of an analogy.
It would be like if someone was robbing a bank and they haven't broken into the safe yet.
And you're a police officer and you're looking at video footage of for some reason.
But you see actively there's gunned men in there trying to rob the bank and are putting the bank tellers in a closet so that they can go and raid the bank.
But because you see the money is in the safe, you're like, oh, pish posh applesauce, we're fine.
And that's kind of, I think, how our healthcare system like approaches iron labs where there'll be like, oh, your iron is fine.
Like I'm usually like robustly towards like the higher end, but they don't know that about me.
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