What started as a normal evening quickly turned into the scariest experience of my life. I had been feeling achy, with some pain in my ear. The doctor prescribed an antibiotic for an ear infection, and we assumed I’d start feeling better soon.
But later that night, the pain in my ear spread down to my neck, and then rapidly moved to my lower back. Something wasn’t right. The pain was relentless. I couldn’t sleep and deep down, I knew something was wrong.
The next morning, we went to the emergency room. After several scans and blood tests, the doctor returned with unexpected news—there was a blood clot. He said I would need blood thinners and should follow up with my primary care provider.
At first, it seemed like a simple, manageable situation. But then, the doctor hesitated. My parents questioned how I got the blood clots. Given my young age (I was a teenager) and otherwise good health, he consulted with a children’s hospital. He sent the scans to a team there, and it was decided this was an emergency and I needed to be transported via ambulance.
It wasn’t until I arrived at the children’s hospital that we learned the severity and urgency of the situation. Immediately, my pain was assessed and managed so that I could get some relief.
My diagnosis was pulmonary emboli, pulmonary infarction, and pleural effusion. After piecing everything together, the doctors believed the clots were caused by the birth control I had been taking for the past six months.
But the situation was far worse than we had realized. It wasn’t just one clot—there were many, spread throughout my lungs and my inferior vena cava (IVC), the major vein that carries blood from the lower body to the heart.
Emergency surgery was scheduled within the next 12 hours. The doctors later told me how lucky I was to be alive. The number of clots in my IVC alone was life-threatening, and the damage to my lungs was significant.
This experience has changed my lifestyle in that I have low energy most of the time. Anything physical has me winded and sore. I’m afraid of getting more, and every pain or discomfort scares me. You never think something like this will happen to you—until it does.
