Memoirs of a Somebody

Deep Vein Thrombosis: Sounds like a porn title, but definitely is not sexy.

15 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment

by crookedfinger in Health Tags: birth control, boyfriend, dvt, panic attack

[Here's the TL;DR version for those who don't want to read this whole novel of a post:

I have (had?) a blood clot in my leg caused by the recent start of birth control. It was behind my right knee, hurt like a sunuvabitch for a week, and thankfully didn't break off to travel anywhere else in my body. I'm fine for the most part now, aside from the occasional panic attack (which may partially be from missing 2 weeks of school and trying to catch up), and I'm on blood thinners until May. I have been forbidden from ever taking hormonal birth control again. Also, my boyfriend is a saint of a man who deserves a massive shout-out for sticking by my side through all of this (as well as helping me with the resulting panic attacks).]

Anyway, I had/have a blood clot in my leg.

To tell the whole story, I’d have to rewind it a bit to the Thursday before that. I woke up with a sore calf. You know how it feels the day after you get a really hard calf cramp? It felt like that. Sore like I’d had a cramp in my sleep.

I walked around on it all Thursday. On Friday, my calf was still sore. Okay, it’s pretty normal to have a sore calf for a couple of days after a bad cramp. By the end of the day, though, it wasn’t feeling any better and had actually gotten worse, so I did a little online research on calf strains, thinking my calf had just cramped so hard that it tore the muscles. I started icing it, keeping off of it, keeping it wrapped in ACE bandage, keeping it elevated. The elevation and bandage helped, but the ice just made it hurt worse.

I had to feed my roommate’s cats over the weekend, so my boyfriend came over and we mainly just sat around all weekend. By Monday, I began to worry that I’d seriously injured myself (as my situation had not improved in the slightest), so I called off from my classes and made an appointment to visit the student health center on campus for Tuesday. Tuesday rolled around and I realized that I wouldn’t even be able to walk to the bus stop to catch the bus. Luckily my boyfriend (saint that he is) asked his boss if he could leave early and came to pick me up and take me to the appointment.

The doctor talked to me for a short while, asking me questions about recent travel, taking a look at my leg. She called in a more senior doctor (the one I hate, since he always asks “What do YOU think is wrong?” — Hey asshole, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be coming to you for help, would I?). They asked me more questions, then told me that I needed to go get an ultrasound done on my leg up at the ER because they thought it might be a blood clot.

Great. I had a panic attack while waiting for the nurses to get me directions to the hospital. The less oblivious nurse helped me get out to my boyfriend’s truck and he whisked me off to the Emergency Room.

The student health center had called ahead to the ER to let them know I was coming and why, so we didn’t have to sit around for very long before they got me in for an ultrasound. That part was kind of interesting. The technician was a younger guy with a mop of hair; he looked like he should be in a boy band or doing college homework, but he was nice and showed me what he was doing, how the veins compressed when he pushed on them.

After that, I joined my boyfriend in the ER waiting room again, and we waited. And waited. And waited. The doctor poked her head out the door and told me they’d found a clot in my leg, then disappeared again. So we waited some more. And some more. My leg was getting more and more painful as the night continued on, to the point where I was crying because it hurt so bad. It felt like a calf cramp that just kept going on and on… Around 8:30 or so, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and had my boyfriend tell the receptionist it was getting worse and we were ushered off to a room with a bed. Eventually they gave me some Percocet and apologized profusely for not giving me any pain meds earlier. I finally was able to relax a bit and stop crying. A second doctor came in to talk to me about the treatment plan they’d worked up for me. I was feeling kinda floaty from the drugs, so I was trying hard to pay attention and failing. He’d been talking for maybe 10 minutes when I suddenly felt like I might throw up. I’m not used to strong pain meds, and I hadn’t eaten anything but a granola bar and some peanuts during the night, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that I was feeling nauseous.  It was pretty funny how smoothly he kicked the biohazard trash can in front of me right before I lost it.

Anyway, we finally got out of the ER around midnight with prescriptions in hand. I didn’t get much sleep that night. I was having a lot of pain mixed with panic attacks. Blood clots in the legs are known to break off, travel to the lungs, and kill a person, after all.

My lovely boyfriend took the next day off of work to help me out and get my prescriptions. That was also an issue, since the shots they’d prescribed me (Lovenox) cost approximately $1500 per week. I was already in a bad state of mind, so that news made me start crying again, right in the middle of Walgreens. The pharmacist bent over backwards talking to the hospital and getting them to understand that there was absolutely no way I could afford the shots (HI THERE, I’M A POOR PERSON WITH VERY LIMITED HEALTH INSURANCE). The hospital eventually got me qualified for a poor person program and they gave me a week’s worth of shots free of charge.

My boyfriend had to go back to work the next day, but he came back after work and stayed the night each day for the rest of the week. He dealt with my nightly panic attacks and sobbing after trips to the bathroom (walking made my calf feel like a knife was stabbing into the back of it). He was really amazingly supportive.

That Friday I had an appointment to visit the anticoagulation clinic so they could help me figure out the proper dosage for the Coumadin, since everybody’s body reacts differently to it. The doctor there was extremely nice and helpful. She explained to me how the drugs I was on were working to help my body get rid of the clot (she even drew diagrams for me), took me through what I needed to watch out for while taking Coumadin (specifically, the diet-related restrictions…which really suck, since pretty much all of my favorite vegetables are the ones with a lot of vitamin K in them). She told me I needed to do as much walking as I could and get a compression stocking to help keep the blood and fluids from pooling in my leg. She also highly suggested getting my blood tested for genetic clotting disorders, just in case it was more than just the birth control that caused it.

Anyway, it’s been a month and I’m pretty much back to normal. I wear the compression sock during the day. I haven’t had any leg pains for a couple of weeks. I came back for the last couple of weeks of school and have been busily trying to catch up. I think I’m going to be okay.