15mos Post Surgery -- fun with body chemistry

First off, for those that are still having problems post surgery I'm really sorry you are going through that.  My thoughts are with you!  I wish your experience could have been as smooth as mine was.

After reading some others' comments (I'm glad my experience was useful to others) I thought I would post some updates about how life has gone since my surgery, as well as something weird that happened but was explainable.

First off, I leveraged the boost in weight loss from my initial recovery and have maintained a rigorous exercise program ever since.  I now exercise 6 days a week and I'm loving it.  I mention this not to brag, but because there were some interesting effects on my exercise routine as my anemia slowly recovered.

While I was anemic I was really sluggish.  No matter how much I exercised, I never got to the point where I felt like I had enough energy.  After my anemia subsided (it became obvious my hemorrhoids were the cause because I bounced back a few months after surgery) I started feeling like I had tons of energy during my workout which was awesome!

Now for the weird part -- my anemia did more than just recover, I went completely the opposite direction.  My GP took me off iron tablets.  After that end it went like this; 6 mos after surgery my iron levels were normal but trending up.  A year after surgery they got really high, to the point where my GP was telling me needed to monitor this, and follow up in 3 mos and if it was still going higher we needed to do something about it.  Luckily 3 mos later the upward trend dissipated and by the time of my next follow up in January this year, I was back to normal range and had stabilized.  What I think happened was my body became so adept and hanging on to every scrap of iron it could, that it just went a little overboard after I fixed the problem and that it takes some time to stabilize.  Everything is back to normal now, and I had perfect labs on my last follow up.