Birth control

I was six months in my new job as an attorney when I felt pain in my ribs and shortness of breath. I went to urgent care and was rushed to the ER after my D-Dimer blood test came back high. At the hospital, they did a CT scan and found the blood clots in…

I had knee surgery and was six weeks post-op, so I had no worries about clots. I was also on birth control, though. I stretched one night and felt excruciating pain in my left rib. I could barely move. I managed to get to a hospital and was told it was costochondritis — inflammation of…

I suffer from severe polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and irregular cycles. My doctor prescribed birth control pills to regulate my cycle back in December 2021. I often felt cramps in my left leg, but I attributed them to dehydration or fatigue, given that I was a 20-year-old college student at the time. However, after my…

I was in my early 30s and enjoying life as a new mom, but I had been having a rough time for nine weeks, experiencing severe headaches and aphasia. I was worked up by a neurologist thoroughly and had all kinds of tests and scans — an MRI, MRA, an EEG — and everything was…

I was 25 when I was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis and a pulmonary embolism. When I first noticed something was abnormal I was getting off from work and I saw significant swelling in my leg below the knee to the tip of my toes. My calf was so large that my pants were too…

Three days after my 18th birthday, I experienced severe swelling in my left leg. I assumed I pulled a muscle as I went ice skating on my birthday, but that soon changed. I went to school as normal and my teachers and friends noticed that my leg was purple and three times the size of…

As told by her mother, Darla My daughter, Christina, suffered a broken foot on January 6, 2015, just two weeks after her 30th birthday. The podiatrist put her in a walking boot and gave no restrictions. Christina then developed calf pain and went to the ER on January 10, 2015. The ER sent her home…

A few days before my collapse, I felt a little out of breath when moving around. However, I had just got back from travelling around Thailand and I also had a sore throat, so I assumed I was just a little run down. I was wrong. On March 22, 2023, I walked down the stairs…

In May of 2019, I began experiencing a dry cough. It continued to progress to the point where I could no longer hold a conversation without coughing every four words or so. I went to a family doctor who brushed it off as adult-onset asthma and allergies, gave me a chest X-ray, and sent me…

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…