Patient Stories

It started in 2013 with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in my right leg and a pulmonary embolism (PE). After walking around on a sore and swollen leg for a while, I experienced severe shortness of breath after climbing two flights of stairs.    My brother took me to the hospital, where I was treated and placed…

My first issue with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) began in November of 2022. My family and I went on a five-hour road trip to Disneyland. A week after returning home, I began to develop a charley horse cramp in my right calf.    I assumed I had pulled a muscle somehow. I tried massage and…

In the summer of 2022, I started having shortness of breath but thought nothing of it. I had just run an 18-mile trail race the Saturday before, and it can take a few days for your body to feel normal again. A little coughing and sore throat from running in the dirt for four hours…

In January 2021, I woke up in the middle of a Sunday night feeling like I needed to put ice water on my body. As I carried the glass of ice water back to bed, I suddenly found myself struggling to make it to the couch. What seemed like minutes later, I woke up with…

In August 2020, I had severe left calf cramping, but I didn’t think much of it. The next morning, I awoke to a sensation going up my leg. I felt an explosion in my chest and could not catch my breath. I figured it was anxiety until the next day, when I couldn’t handle the…

I will never forget February 18, 2022. At the time, I was a healthy, active 30-year-old, training for my seventh half marathon. Two nights before, I had developed chest pain and shortness of breath. I wrote off the chest pain as a pulled muscle from lifting and dismissed the shortness of breath as anxiety.    But…

I had an injury to my forearm in June 2022. Less than a week later, I started getting severe chest pains. I was taken to the hospital with c-reactive protein test (CRP) markers of 93 and was sent home with antibiotics.   A week later, I experienced the same pain, but worse. This time a CT…

Turning 50 was no big deal to me. I was healthy, happy, and active. But a few months later, I was diagnosed with five life-threatening blood clots in my lungs, along with a large infarct — a small area of dead tissue resulting from the failure of blood supply – at the base of my…

I started to get sick very frequently around March 2019. I was having terrible colds and coughing all of the time. A few months later, I started having difficulty climbing stairs and couldn’t even walk without developing shortness of breath and feeling like I was having a heart attack.    I went to my primary care doctor…

One week before my diagnosis, I noticed I was getting weak. Not weakness from being tired, but unusually weak without cause (I thought).   I also had a nagging cough and was constantly clearing my throat. I began to presume that I had caught the coronavirus, so I started doctoring myself. After a few days, I…