Factor V Leiden

I’m 30 years old and have a complicated medical history. As a teenager, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and today I manage more than 20 different health conditions. On April 20, 2021, I felt severe pain in my left leg. It was swollen, purple, and hot to the touch. I called my…

Two weeks after a 68-mile bike ride, I couldn’t straighten my leg, and my veins bulged. “It’s just a bruise,” the ER doctor said, looking at my leg. He dismissed it the same way that the sports doctor and physical therapists did. But weeks later, my leg looked blue with spider veins. I sent a…

I was living in Arizona and going to school. I was in a very minor car accident where my knee hit the dashboard. It was bruised, and about two weeks later, I started feeling a painful cramp behind my knee, similar to a charley horse. When I told my primary care doctor, he ordered an…

I’m a three-time deep vein thrombosis survivor. My story starts during my first pregnancy. I experienced bleeding during the first and second trimesters and the baby was same for gestational age. I tried to get the obstetrician to look into it, to no avail. For my second pregnancy, I had emergency C-section. The baby’s heartbeat…

On April 4, 2025, I awoke around 4:30 a.m. with the worst charley horse under my left breast, wrapping around to my back and up my arm. I went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with abdominal pain and sent home with naproxen. Two days later, I returned to the ER with worsening pain…

I got home from work and found it very painful to walk up the stairs. It felt like I pulled my groin. The next day I was supposed to see my mom for her birthday, but I could not get out of bed because I couldn’t move my legs. My mom told me to call…

On September 30, 2023, I was driving up a mountain to a fall festival near my home in West Virginia with my husband and parents when I began having difficulty breathing, and my heart started racing. By the time we stopped, I could not breathe deep enough and almost passed out. I had to sit…

It started on a Tuesday with mild lower back pain. I assumed that I’d strained something somehow. By Wednesday, the pain was slightly worse, and I felt weak, short of breath, and dizzy when standing—something definitely wasn’t right. By Friday, the pain spread to my left groin and down my left thigh. I convinced myself…

As told by his mother, Amy My son Nickolas first developed superficial blood clots after fracturing his leg in 2019. He took baby aspirin and had no issues after his leg was healed until the fall of 2020 when he developed the blood clots again. He had no trauma to cause them. He went to…

As told by Finley’s mother, Veronica Finley had been diagnosed with factor V Leiden homozygous in May 2023. I asked for him to be tested due to family history. No one explained his diagnosis to us, nor was it given any credence when brought up at doctor appointments. In June of 2024, in the height…