I shed my blood to fight the Celtic Curse!

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Feeling a bit drained today, quite literally. 8.30 this morning I had to be in the hospital to have 500ml of blood drained from my body - it's a procedure called a venesection and it's something I have to have done once or twice a year. It always leaves me feeling a bit run down for a couple of days afterwards, but believe me, it's better than the alternative. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called haemochromatosis. It's an inheritited condition, although neither of my parents seem to have suffered from it. You generall need to have inherited a mutant gene from each of your parents to develop symptoms - some people get symptoms if they only inherit one gene, but that's a lot less common. The condition causes the body to retain too much iron - instead of the body getting rid of surplus iron in the usual way, it just gets stored, and the iron in your body slowly creeps up over the years. Eventually you start to develope symptoms, which can include chronic fatigue, brain fog, depression and anxiety, joint pain and bronzin of the skin. Most of those symptoms are pretty generic, and not everyone develops all the symptoms, so its under-diagnosed. If iron levels continue to build, it can lead to things like heart failure, liver disease and diabetese. Lucky I was diagnosed before the more serious complications arose, but I was seriously fatigued back then, and definitely suffering from bad memory and emotional problems. Fortunately, management is simple for most people. Removing blood via venesections causes the body to use some of the surplus iron that's stored to make new blood, thus reducing the surplus bit by bit. My iron level was something like fourteen times normal when I was diagnosed, and I started by having a venesection once every two or three weeks. That went on for about a year and a half, till I got down to normal levels. Now I'm in what's known as maintenance, so I just need to go once or twice a year. Haemochromatosis is most prevalent in Ireland, where it's reckoned that around 1 in 80 of the population has it. In Great Britain, where I live, it's more like 1 in 150-200 people. It's also quite common in Nordic countries. The mutant gene seems to have its origins around 4,000 years ago. Some DNA was recoverd from a grave on an island off the north coast of Ireland, and when tested it had the mutant gene. People in Nordic countries are also known to have had the conditon within a few generations of this. Of course people from the British Isles, and people from the Nordic countries (aka "Vikings") are known for getting about a bit, so over the last few thousand years there's been plento of time for the mutant gene to get around the world. Theoretically, anyone, anywhere could have it and not know. But it's most prevalant in Ireland, and for that reason haemochromatosis is often nicknamed "The Celtic Curse". I quite like that nickname, it sounds dramatic, like the title of a horror movie. Fortunately it is easy to manage if it's diagnosed in time. So if you ever develope persistent symptoms such as those I've described, you could do worse than to ask your doctor about getting your iron levels tested. You never know.