Kept getting told everything looked normal while feeling completely drained
At first I thought I was just recovering badly from stress or sleeping terribly or maybe even dealing with depression again but over time it started getting harder to explain away because even small things were wiping me out.
I stopped tolerating caffeine the same way, my body felt heavy all the time and sometimes I would feel weirdly sick after pushing myself too hard for a couple days in a row. Not sick in a flu way just completely drained and unable to function properly. My doctor ran the standard stuff more than once and every time I got told everything looked pretty normal. After a while I got tired of guessing and ended up getting more comprehensive bloodwork done through Goodlabs including ferritin, vitamin D, B12 and a full thyroid panel. A couple things came back lower than expected and I started supplementing iron and vitamin D after talking it through with my doctor.
Still nowhere near feeling normal and I do not think a few deficiencies explain everything but it at least made me feel less crazy seeing that something was objectively off instead of hearing your labs look fine over and over.
TLDR basic testing kept coming back normal so I looked into ferritin, B12, vitamin D and thyroid markers more thoroughly and found a few things that were probably contributing to the fatigue.