Low Ferritin Symptoms Women Miss — Ferritin At Ten
Low Ferritin Symptoms Women Keep Getting Dismissed — Until They Stop Waiting
Low ferritin symptoms women experience are some of the most dismissed findings in conventional medicine.
I am 48 years old and have run 23 marathons. I have been a lifelong vegetarian, I strength train, I track my recovery, and I take my health seriously.
Low ferritin symptoms women experience like the hair loss, the exhaustion, the feeling that something is just off, were showing up in my body for years. My doctors kept telling me I was fine. So I stopped waiting for the system to hand me answers and went looking for them myself.
This episode is the payoff to last week’s cliffhanger. If you have not listened to Something Was Wrong and Nobody Could Tell Me Why, go back and start there. This is the episode where I tell you what we actually found.
Why I Stopped Trusting Standard Bloodwork
After Valentine’s Day 2026 I knew I was done. Four years of injuries, four years of being told everything was normal for my age, and then one morning my body just said enough.
I had been talking to friends for a while. Many of them had been specifically telling me to get my ferritin tested, not just iron, but ferritin. Hormones kept coming up too. And then social media did what social media does and stalked my conversations long enough to start serving me ads for Function Health.
Which, honestly, fair.
I looked into it. I did my research. There are a lot of options out there for comprehensive testing and I decided to go with Function Health. They test 125 biomarkers. My regular doctor tested maybe a dozen. The difference in what those extra markers revealed changed everything.
The Low Ferritin Symptoms Women Miss — Starting With Mine
Ferritin is not the same as iron. Most doctors check iron. Very few check ferritin without being specifically asked. Ferritin is the stored form of iron and it is what your body actually runs on.
The minimum ferritin level should be around 70. For a marathon runner it should be closer to 100.
Mine was 10.
I was not surprised it was low. I had been asking my doctors to check my iron for years and been told I was fine every time. What I did not know was that they were not checking the right thing. The low ferritin symptoms women experience like hair loss, fatigue, poor recovery, had been showing up in my body for years. I had even been taking a prescription for hair loss, knowing in my gut it was something more.
Confirmation is not always comforting. But it is always better than being dismissed.
The Omega-3 Finding I Was Not Even Looking For
My omega-3 result did not surprise me once I saw it, but I was not looking for it either.
I do not eat seafood and am a lifelong vegetarian. I get some omega-3 from flaxseed and chia seeds but not nearly enough, and honestly I am not sure it is even possible to eat enough of those to compensate. My omega-6 to omega-3 ratio came back at nearly 10 to 1. That is a pro-inflammatory environment living inside my body every single day.
The moment I saw it, it made complete sense.
Bone Density at the 11th Percentile
This one was genuinely shocking.
I am 48 years old and my bone density is in the 11th percentile. My mom had gone through breast cancer and specifically told me, “get your bone density checked now while you still have time to build it back up. Do not end up like me.”
So I listened. It turned out she was right.
Scary? Yes. But I found out at 48, not 68. There is still time to do something about it. That matters enormously.
Lp(a) at 170 — The One I Was Completely Unprepared For
Lipoprotein(a). Most people have never heard of it. I certainly had not.
It is a genetic cardiac risk factor. Mine came back at 170 nmol/L — elevated. Nobody in my family has had heart issues that I know of. There was no reason I would even be looking for this.
Here is the hardest part. There is not much I can do about it. It is genetic. It has been there my whole life and nobody ever told me.
I am a perfectionist. I want to fix everything. Sitting with something I cannot fix is its own kind of grief. I asked a lot of questions about that one and then I went straight to my family group chat and told everyone, because if I have it, they might too. They deserve to know that.
Getting Dismissed One More Time
When I got these results I made an appointment with my primary care doctor as fast as I could. I walked in with ferritin at 10.
I was told: take some supplements, you will feel fine, nothing we can do, and I cried right there in the office.
Ten is not normal. Seventy is the minimum. One hundred is where a marathon runner needs to be. Being dismissed again after four years of the exact same thing was the nail in the coffin. I am done with that system. I am finding my own people now.
Finding a Menopause Specialist Who Actually Listened
And then I found my people, or I am starting to.
LIV HRT in Austin. A Menopause Society Certified Provider. Someone who listened, looked at the full picture, and said: yes, this is not right, and here is what we are going to do about it.
A referral to a hematologist for my ferritin. Confirmation that my hormones were off. A real plan: estradiol gel, progesterone, and testosterone gel.
One appointment. After years of being dismissed. One appointment with the right person changed everything.
That should not be remarkable. Somehow it is.
The Grief Nobody Talks About
Getting confirmation of how far along perimenopause actually was hit me in two directions at once, relief and grief, at the same time.
Nobody prepares you for this transition. Everyone talks about growing up, puberty, all the firsts. Nobody talks about this part. About what it actually does to you physically and emotionally. About how hard it is to sit with.
I know aging is a blessing. Getting to do it is a blessing. But nobody warns you about this chapter, and that is part of why I am talking about it openly.
Low Ferritin Symptoms Women Should Not Have to Fight This Hard to Get Answers
Function Health is not a perfect answer. The perfect answer would be your actual doctor running these tests, reading the results with you, and connecting the dots. That is the world we deserve. It is not the world most of us are living in right now.
Here is the truth: a doctor’s job is to keep you alive. Alive and actually living a good life are two very different things.
You should not have to fight this hard for your own health. But until the system changes, nobody is going to do it for you. So you do it yourself.
I am on progesterone. Estrogen gel and testosterone gel are on the way. I have a hematologist appointment scheduled. I am finally moving the needle. For the first time in a long time I am hopeful.
Always a work in progress. But progress is the point.
Listen to This Episode
If you have ever been dismissed, told you were fine, or felt like you were fighting alone…you are not.
Listen to Ferritin At Ten here:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | jamapantel.com
Keep Listening
Start with last week’s episode if you have not yet — this one lands much harder with the full picture: Something Was Wrong and Nobody Could Tell Me Why
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