Hello, I have been feeling really alone lately and thought that maybe finding a group like this would help me feel like I’m not the only one. I am 24 and 5 months ago I decided to go on hormonal birth control for the first time. It was fine for two months during which time I did a lot of traveling (I live abroad) and after a particularly long flight with a delay, I got a leg cramp that felt like a perpetual charlie horse. I had no idea what a DVT was and didn’t do anything about it, so about two weeks later, I couldn’t breathe very well and we took me to the hospital. I wasn’t home at the time, I was with different family (still abroad) and spent several days in the hospital with what they told me were multiple blood clots in both of my lungs. I’ve been on Xarelto for three months and I have three months to go and my life has honestly gone almost totally back to normal. I haven’t had any pain since two weeks after I got out of the hospital, I went back to where I’m living (my parents wanted me to return home to the US and I refused), and I can do pretty much everything I can do before except get a tattoo or buy rollerblades. It just really feels like a lot some days when I start reading some of the statistics out there about what happened to me (such low odds it’s ridiculous). None of my friends or family really understand at all what I’m going through and their reaction has just been “wow how scary” even though it wasn’t really a traumatic experience for me, only one that was and still is really hard to process. No one in my family has ever had any sort of health crisis anywhere close to this magnitude, so my whole family freaked out and being the center of attention across the world wasn’t something I enjoyed. When I get off of my meds, I’ll go to a hematologist for blood tests about why I might’ve been susceptible to this, but for now I’m in a sort of limbo. My parents don’t know I was on birth control, so they are still very concerned it will happen again even though I know it won’t because I have since switched to a non hormonal method that actually isn’t available in the US yet, so not only can I not talk to them about it, I don’t know anyone who uses this type who can empathize with how hard it’s been combining them (not health-risk hard, but heavier bleeding, etc). I know it was a good decision to stay where I’m living instead of going home and I am proud of myself that I chose to stick it out, I just wonder whether there’s anyone out there who can relate to some parts of my story and make me feel less alone. My friends here are so supportive when I talk about these things, but I also want to hear from people who can relate.
Thank you so much.