COVID

I was 33 years old. I had a cramp in my leg and figured it was just that until it lasted three days. I’ve always been judged and misunderstood when it comes to my health anxiety but this time it saved my life. I knew something wasn’t right and made a doctor’s appointment. I had…

When I was a child, my brother and I were tested for factor V Leiden after my father had a clot that traveled to his lungs (PE) and was diagnosed with the factor V disorder. The test came back normal for both me and my brother. About 10 years later, I was 22, working my…

It was June of 2023. I was five days postpartum when I started to get really erratic blood pressure readings. It would go from 177/206 to 123/79 within minutes, up and down like a roller coaster. I was also having palpitations and I remember telling the doctor later that I had a twinge of pain…

In September 2022, I underwent a foam sclerotherapy on the great saphenous vein in my left leg to treat a varicose vein. This is a minimally-invasive, non-surgical procedure that involves injecting a foam mixture into varicose veins to treat underlying vein conditions. At the time, I was unknowingly Covid positive for the second time in…

I had lower right leg pain for more than a month. I finally went to urgent care in October 2022. I described the pain as a pinging inside my leg and I thought it was a stress fracture. The provider asked a few questions about medications. I told her I took tamoxifen to reduce a…

In November 2022, I caught COVID-19 and was battling sickness for over a week. Mild symptoms persisted for a few weeks beyond that, but I was pretty much back to my normal routine by December. In January 2023, I began noticing symptoms that I had never experienced in the months prior: random shortness of breath,…

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…

I was diagnosed with COVID in February of 2020 and had severe symptoms, including extremely painful breathing.   I developed an internal jugular vein thrombosis (IJVT)  in my neck during the initial COVID-19 infection. I had symptoms from the IJVT for two years, but it wasn’t discovered until I had a transient ischemic attack (TIA), which…

In November of 2021, I had COVID and was down and out for two weeks. As I was starting to feel better, pain began developing in my left leg. At first, I thought I was dehydrated or lacking protein.    Two days went by. My left leg was twice the size of my right leg, and…