My body has run out of vitamin B12 after my second pregnancy. And this was very severe! Luckily, I am fine again today (and so is my daughter!) but I know so damm well, how important vitamin B12 is for your body! Therefore, I'm honored to be the CEO of a company who is producing this essential vitamin.
Vitamin B12 is so essential for human life, that your body has a reserve storage of Vitamin B12 that lasts for 3-5 years. Imagine that! Your body stores a supply of 3-5 years of a vitamin - just to make damm sure, you are not running out of it?!
To illustrate how crazy that is, imagine a supply of 3-5 years of something you use daily: toilet paper for example. If you wanted to store 5 years of toilet paper supply for you, this would be 500 rolls for one person. Would you store 500 rolls of toilet paper per person or 2'000 rolls for a family of four - just in case? Probably not! This sounds crazy, even in pandemic times!
Why my body ran out of Vitamin B12
When I was pregnant with my second baby (she is today a healthy girl!), my body had a super high-need of Vitamin B12 for the baby. Because during a pregnancy, the baby gets it all. And unfortunately, nobody really noticed that my body did not have enough Vitamin B12 for me AND the baby (well I did: I was very tired all the time). But nobody really took it serious: Even though it is common to measure Vitamin B12 levels with pregnant women, my gynaecologist was more on the side of "well, the second pregnancy is more tiring because you already have a child at home" or like "well, it can't be you are low on Vitamin B12 because we already tested it last time and it was ok".
Well, it turned out that actually nothing was ok and I was super low on Vitamin B12: The pregnancy really depleted my Vitamin B12 reserves. Why it was that severe is now, in hindsight, difficult to say, but probably a combination of several factors like stress at work, already low levels after the first pregnancy, nutritional issues and so on.
Living with Vitamin B12 insufficiencies
The lack of Vitamin B12 lead to me being super tired all the time. I had to sleep almost every day during the day and still needed 12 hours of sleep at night. I literally had "no nerves" anymore and lost my temper far too often. My hair turned grey and suddenly I developed strange allergies to things I've never reacted before. The impact on my health was so significant, that it was the right moment to quit corporate life and found my own start-up (a marketplace for handycraft material): this gave me the freedom, to work according to my energy levels - and sleep whenever I needed to.
Luckily, I found a GP who took me serious and could treat the Vitamin B12 insufficiencies. She gave me lots of Vitamin B12 substitutes and it took a long while to stock up my reserves again with Vitamin B12 but I'm back to being a healthy person again!
To be the CEO of a company that develops Vitamin B12 seems like destiny: Because I know so well, how important Vitamin B12 is and I hope I can help other women and mothers avoid needing to live with Vitamin B12 insufficiencies!