Woman

I’m an artist, and I was editing and spending long hours working with few breaks. In addition, I didn’t get up on my last flight from Washington, DC to Los Angeles. Prior to traveling, I noticed swelling in one leg, but I ignored it. Upon my return, I took a one-mile walk that normally takes…

I broke my left leg in eight places and had three surgeries within a three-week period. I was in a wheelchair and could not walk at all. Whenever I tried to stand and get upright, I’d feel an excruciating pain behind my left knee. It hurt as much as the 48 staples and cuts on…

In 2021, I had a routine laparoscopy procedure and came out of the general anesthetic coughing up blood. I was pale, sweaty, low on oxygen, and experiencing a fast heart rate and chest pains. After being told by the surgeon, “We were rough with the tube we put down your throat,” I was discharged like…

Waking up and not being able to catch your breath at 20 years old is the scariest thing. On November 14, 2022, I woke up at 4 a.m. gasping for air with intense pain in my lower back and sharp pain in my chest. My immediate reaction to the pain was to try and stand…

During my senior year at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, I started getting sick. For about two months, my heart rate would randomly start going really high for no reason. I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be at 160 beats per minute. I went to the doctor, and they…

In November 2022, I was experiencing symptoms like joint pain and swelling in my arms and legs. I avoided seeing my doctor at first, but then I noticed I was increasingly short of breath, easily winded when I took the stairs and even when having a conversation. I had a little bit of chest pain,…

I had a bad case of the flu last December. However, I am a primary school teacher and a workaholic, so I did very little about it and carried on going to work. On the last Friday before Christmas, I woke up at 4 a.m. gasping for breath. My chest was extremely tight, and I…

On October 7, 2020, a vein burst in my leg. At the ER, they ran no tests. They told me the vein looked like cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection, and sent me home with an antibiotic. They said if the red area got bigger, I should come back. I went back on the 11th and…

I was first blindsided by deep vein thrombosis after the birth of my second child in 1993. Shortly after she was born, I remember stumbling on the steps on my way upstairs after preparing a middle-of-the-night bottle. I thought I had pulled a muscle, and the growing pain in my leg didn’t alarm me. But…

In February 2018, three days after emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder, I had a really bad pain in my right calf and was having difficulty breathing. So, I went to the emergency room, and I was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis (DVT), or a blood clot in the right leg, and bilateral pulmonary embolism…