Birth control

I had COVID for the first time in November of 2020. My symptoms were typical: fatigue, loss of appetite, and shortness of breath.    Once I recovered, I had ongoing yet mild shortness of breath, so when it started happening more frequently, I wrote it off as just a symptom of long COVID. Looking back, I…

After a business trip to France followed by a week of mild COVID symptoms, I was eager to get back into my routine. That is, until I started feeling a strange pain in my leg about three weeks later.   I’d recently had a dermatological procedure on that leg, so I thought my stitches might be…

June 2021 was the month my life was flipped upside down. I started experiencing intense pressure in my head and a sharp pain in my neck and shoulder that radiated down my arm.    I visited my primary care doctor and an urgent care center, where I was prescribed muscle relaxers, a steroid, and was set…

In March 2022, while going about my everyday activities, I suddenly experienced extreme breathlessness. It felt like someone had hit me, and my heart was beating out of my chest.    I’m a single parent, and my then –7-year-old found me on the bed. There was no ambulance available to get to me; I was told…

I have always been a relatively active person, and I participated in kickboxing and powerlifting.   It was 2020 and I was one month away from my 30th birthday, doing jump squats in my living room due gyms closed by COVID. I felt a pain in my left hip and thought I pulled a muscle.   …

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…

When I was 14, I flew to my dad’s house in California to celebrate Christmas with him and my siblings. By the middle of the week, my left thigh was swollen, red, and hot and I couldn’t walk on it. I tried many things to get myself moving, but it hurt too much.   When I…

In 1983, I began experiencing pain in my side, shortness of breath and coughing up blood. At the ER, I was diagnosed with pleurisy, which is inflammation of the tissues that line the lungs and chest cavity. I was only 17 years old. Two weeks later, I began having pain in my left groin and…

I was diagnosed with a massive bilateral pulmonary embolism (PE) on November 5, 2021, three weeks after my 23rd birthday. Everything started as a pain in my calf. The funny thing is that the pain began mid-workout, making me believe it was a pulled muscle.   After a few days, the pain started to travel upwards…

After giving birth to my daughter by emergency c-section due to preeclampsia, I started to feel very ill. My right leg was throbbing and my chest hurt. I followed up with the doctor on this, and a quick scan showed blood clots in my leg (deep vein thrombosis) and my chest (pulmonary embolism). I was…