Patient Stories

Early in my pregnancy, I thought I’d pulled a muscle in my left calf. The pain was horrible for at least two weeks. I soaked it and elevated it, but the pain didn’t cease. I went to urgent care but they sent me home and told me to continue to take Tylenol, ice, and elevate.…

As told by his brother, Brandon. My brother Joel was sick with the flu for a couple of days at Marietta College where he was a freshman linebacker on the football team and a petroleum engineering major. He woke up one morning and told my mother by phone he was having difficulty breathing. No one…

I woke up one morning in the summer of 2011 with nausea and pain in the left side of my torso/abdomen. At first, I wrote it off as a stomach bug and called in sick at work. After a couple of days, I was feeling worse so went to an urgent care clinic. The doctor…

In Paris, during my second night, searing pain tore through my right lung. I hurried to the hospital and straight into the ICU. Reality hit hard. Blood clots besieged my lungs, diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism (PE), stemming from a larger clot in my left calf—deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The cause? Not a mere muscle…

As told by her mother, Dawn. My daughter Leah was a healthy 20-year-old college student who needed a pretty extensive knee surgery in 2017. She came home from Purdue and had the surgery on May 12, 2017 so she could be ready to get back for fall semester. On June 5, 2017, she had a…

The day before New Year’s Eve of 2017, I was experiencing a fast heart rate and shortness of breath. My Apple Watch was going crazy saying my resting heart rate was 180 and above. I ignored it, thinking it was broken. I went to bed and woke up the next morning with shortness of breath,…

Throughout my pregnancy, I experienced pain and cramps in my legs, and lots of strange, unexplained bruising. My OB/GYN said it was normal. The last month of my pregnancy, I started having occasional chest pains and my breathing had become different. It didn’t feel like shortness of breath. The only way I could explain it…

No one will ever forget when the world shut down because of COVID in 2020. A few days later, I started to lose feeling in my left leg. Whenever I stood up, my leg turned purple. While everyone else was taking walks to pass the time during lockdown, I was finding it harder and harder…

In September 2023, I was feeling poorly with what turned out to be a kidney infection. I couldn’t move as the pain was unbearable and was bed-bound for a few weeks. By the end of September, I was unable to walk. It all happened so quickly. My calf swelled up at least three times the…

I developed my first deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE) around 10 weeks pregnant with my second child. From then on, I was on enoxaparin sodium injections and everything was going great until 37 weeks, when the same feeling in my leg came back. We returned to the hospital where an ultrasound once…