When you love someone the last thing you ever want to see is them in pain or suffering. When it’s your husband or wife it hurts even more to watch them go through issues with their health, especially with issues they cannot control. When I married my husband back in June I vowed to love him in “Sickness and in Health” and the saddest part is my husband has been given such a bad run of luck with his health and I sometimes feel helpless against it.

John is only 28 years old (young) and yet has had 4 instances of blood clots. Blood clots are a life threatening condition, that if not detected and caught in time can travel through your veins to your lungs, heart or your brain and kill you. John had his first clot after hip scope surgery in 2014. He has a bone spur and labrum tear in his hip and had to have surgery on it. The surgery was rough and took quite a bit of time to recover. Unfortunately after his surgery he developed a clot in his leg and also those clots traveled to his lungs. He has multiple pulmonary emboli in both of his lungs. He is very good at knowing when something is just not right in his body and right away he knew that his one calf muscle was swollen, had a distinct color difference in it than his other leg and was very hard. Off to the hospital we went and he was admitted and had to stay in the hospital for five days. Since then  he has had 3 instances now of blood clots, all in his legs even while on blood thinning medicine coumadin.

Fast forward to this weekend and while watching television on the couch he noticed his right leg felt swollen and hot to the touch. He went to sleep with some pain but in the middle of the night he woke up and couldn’t even stand on his leg. He was in visible pain and couldn’t even support his own body weight on it. Away we went to the hospital. The doctors evaluated him and did doplar scans on his leg and indeed they found one clot in his popliteal vein and one clot in his gastrocnemius muscle. These are called DVT or Deep vein thrombosis. It’s so important that if you feel these symptoms below that you should go to the emergency room and ask to have the body part scanned. When your blood clots inside your vein it will not just dissolve on it’s own and you run the risk of it becoming dislodged and traveling through your system.

The American Society of Hematology estimates that DVT affects 900,000 Americans each year and kills up to 100,000 of them. Why did I want to post about this? It’s not something that people seem to think can happen or realize how serious a blood clot is. If you have a blood clot in a major vein you will likely be admitted into the hospital for a few days until your blood levels are therapeutic. This requires injections of Heparil as well as pill form of coumodin. Right now my husband is trying out the new drug Xarelto and will be on that for six months. Prior to that he was taking Coumadin, but with that one you have to go in every two weeks to have your blood drawn and tests done to see if your levels are therapeutic. We will have to wait and see if this new drug will be better, but he also has an appointment with a new hematologist to find out what is causing his clotting. While two of his clots were results of surgery, the other two were not, which is quite scary.

A blood clot in your leg can have various symptoms, including:

• swelling (compare both of your legs, usually you can see a difference in size right away)
• pain
• tenderness
• a warm sensation or higher temp of the skin in that area
• pain in your calf when you stretch your toes upward
• a pale or bluish discoloration

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