Birth control

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…

In 2020, my daughter, Meredith (Mer for short), complained that she was having difficulty breathing. My wife and I dismissed it as perhaps a sinus condition or allergies. The next morning, Mer called us from school telling us she had passed out. She was rushed to the hospital where the physicians asked if she was…

My name is Chelsey. I am 31 and have no prior health issues. On October 26, 2022, I went downstairs to my basement and felt a heaviness in my chest. I reached the bottom step and I felt like I had just run a marathon. I tried to sit down, but the next thing I…

During the summer of 2012, I was going into my senior year of college and was training for Kent State’s Annual Black Squirrel 5k Race. I grew up playing soccer and I figured running a 5k would be a breeze. Little did I know, it was going to change my life forever. I was up…

When I had a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in my left leg, I was a 19-year-old college freshman who had never heard of blood clots before. I assumed I’d broken my leg and hobbled to two classes before going to the hospital. The hospital was a rural one with only four beds in the ER,…

In April 2019, I began to experience symptoms similar to a sinus infection, including frontal head and eye pressure. Over the next few weeks my symptoms worsened, and they developed into nausea, weakness on one side of my body, confusion, loss of appetite, and the most prominent indication —the worst headache of my life! A…

On November 4, 2021, at the age of 27, I started experiencing pain in my neck that shot up through my head. I figured it was just pulled a muscle, but for the next three days the pain got worse. On November 8, four days after the pain started, I decided to go to urgent…