Have you ever had a near death experience? Like when a doctor asks your husband of one year if your organs can be donated? I have. When I was twenty-six I had a bilateral pulmonary embolism. That's a blood clot in both lungs stopping the vessels from sending them blood. It can be a fatal problem. Luckily mine wasn’t, and I’m alive to write this blog post. Like most life altering events, I didn’t realize the significance of the experience to my life at that moment. Seventeen years later I do. Here is what I learned from almost dying at twenty-six.
The first thing that most people ask me about my blood clots is, “what did it feel like? I guess that’s natural curiosity, right? Or perhaps, it’s a self-preservation strategy to gather clues about how not to almost die themselves. For me, my pulmonary embolism started out as a sharp pain in my right shoulder that it woke me up from sleeping. I figured it was just a muscle pain, and tried to go back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I noticed that when I took a deep breath in my chest hurt. That was a more concerning symptom. I debated going to urgent care right away (I should have), but instead made an appointment to come in later that day for an office visit. An hour or so later, while lecturing to my college geography students I started to get out of breath, just by talking. As these small symptoms started to accumulate that morning I became more aware that something weird was going on with my body.
These symptoms all occurred in March of 2006. I was living in the Midwest working as an assistant professor. I was on the job market looking to snag a faculty position back in my home region of southern California. The day before my symptoms started, I had a completed a pretty strong job interview at a California community college for a tenure-track faculty position. After the interview, I caught a flight back to the Midwest, plagued by a long tarmac delay and cancelled connecting flight due to a blizzard. It was that night I started having symptoms.
After I finished my morning breathless lecture, I walked back home from campus and told my husband about my new symptom. He immediately took off of work and accompanied me to my appointment. That turned out to be a really good husband move. My appointment started super normal with some basic questions, followed by some tests. They performed a ventilation–perfusion scan, a nuclear medicine scan that examines air and blood flow in the lungs. I walked in the scanning room and as soon as I lay down on the machine, I could barely breathe. Laying down flat made it nearly impossible to get a full breath, I was literally gasping for air. My symptoms were getting significantly worse. The tech put some radiopharmaceutical fluid in my IV and I felt a hot rush move from my arm down my body straight down to you know where. I felt like I was going to pee out hot radioactive fluid right there in the machine. Things just kept getting weirder. When the scan was over I went back into the waiting room and ten minutes later they came out, and put me immediately into a wheelchair. I was wheeled into a hospital room and it quickly filled up with many different medical professionals. The room was packed. I heard words like STAT, EKG and A-line. My blood was drawn, clothes removed, IV’s were put in, oxygen mask put on. Just one day before I crushed a job interview and now I was being treated like I was dying.
It was much worse for my husband. He told me later about how my doctor took him into a private room that afternoon and asked him if my organs could be donated. What about her eyes? What about her other organs? Seriously? I was just twenty-six, married for one year, and a college professor for just half of a year. My adult life was just getting started. My husband was told to call my family, and have them fly in ASAP to see me. Doctors said that if I survived through the first night, that would be a good sign. I don’t know how he dealt with all of that, but he remained a positive strong force of healing for me. Not cracking in front of me even once. When the sun set that day, the nurses encouraged my husband to go home, rest and take a shower. He didn’t leave, and selfishly I didn’t want him to. It might have been my last night alive.
On my side of things, I felt a quiet calmness inside that I would survive this. My body was young, strong and healthy. There were quality health professionals doting on me, and I had a comfortable room with a view. Thirty-three percent of patients with pulmonary emboli die before ever getting treatment. In my case, I was getting treatment, so I figured that my odds of survival were way better than that. I put my efforts into rest, relaxing, and staying calm. Blood thinning medications and the doctors were the ones doing the work, I just had to let them do their job and save my life. It was explained to me that I had a blood clot in each lung, that it was very serious and the treatment plan was to thin my blood out to prevent more clots. My most pressing problems were having more blood clots, or pulmonary infarction, when lung tissue dies. Despite this news, I really felt like I was going to be OK.
I ended up being treated in the hospital for seven days. During my recovery at the hospital, I was called back for a final interview at that southern California college. I knew I killed it at my first interview! My doctor wouldn’t allow me to travel for the second interview, so I made my case to for the job over the hospital phone while gasping for breath. I didn't get that final job offer, but at least I gave it a try from my hospital bed. In the year after my blood clots, I took daily blood thinning medication and had monthly blood testing. The medication made me at risk for excessive bleeding so I curtailed risky activities like skateboarding and knife throwing. Just kidding about knife throwing. I was instructed to refrain from getting pregnant and stop taking all hormonal forms of birth control. Getting off of the pill suddenly made my hormones go into a tail spin, and my face broke out with large acne that year like I was in middle school.
The second most asked question about my blood clots is, “what caused them? That’s the million-dollar question. I worked with my doctors closely and had follow up testing to try to figure that out. I had three known risk factors: hormonal birth control, family history of pulmonary emboli and a long plane flight. Which one was the driving force? It’s hard to get around genetics, so I’m sure that played a role. But I firmly believe that my birth control was the biggest cause. I think that, because of a class action lawsuit I was a part of, and won against my birth control manufacturer. What I’m allowed to say is that the birth control pill I was using sent many young healthy women to the hospital with blood clots. Some of them died. So many women experienced blood clots while using that pill that a class action lawsuit was filed and I joined them. I won the case against the drug manufacturer seven years after my blood clots almost killed me. It’s not really a win though, when numerous women had near death experiences, long term health consequences and even died. The FDA ended up announcing that women who used this pill “were seventy-four percent more likely to experience a blood clot compared to women who were using other birth control pills.” That information was not on original warning label. In 2013 I received a class action settlement as a result of my blood clots.
The lessons I learned from almost dying at twenty-six are simple. They aren’t ground breaking or new. I could have read about them in a few different books. But they organically rose out of my experience. These lessons had probably always been a part of my hardwiring deep inside. But my health scare solidified them, like wet concrete drying into an impenetrable wall. These lessons became a north arrow that in many ways guided my finances, family life and risk tolerance. They are:
1. Aggressively save.
2. Never waste a weekend.
3. Mitigate risk, but have fun.
Lesson one, Aggressively save. My husband and I were thoughtful about what we wanted to do with the settlement funds. I consulted our tax preparer and financial advisors, but no one else. I kept the settlement private and didn’t tell any of my family and friends. I think this was because it felt like dirty money. I received it as a result of my suffering, and there was no joy in spending it. I treated it with a sort of respect and reverence. It was literally blood money. It didn’t feel right to spend it on a vacation or new stuff. What felt right to us was to have gratitude for my health, and honor the assets by growing them for our awesome future together. With the settlement I settled our remaining college and car debts, invested aggressively in our future retirement and savings and started two college funds for our daughters. I didn’t spend a dime of it on stuff. I doubled down on ways to save, invest, and reduce taxes. This manifested in a detailed excel spreadsheet with color coded columns as I calculated annual and monthly averages for our expenses and income goals. It gave me a sense of control after being so helpless in the hospital. Aggressively saving didn’t mean no fun, quite the opposite. It gave me the financial freedom to have the funds available when opportunities to travel, buy a home, classic car or boat presented themselves. It aggressively grew pots of money to fund adventures back then, now and into my future.
Lesson two, never waste a weekend. This motto is one that defined me to the core in the fifteen years after my blood clots. Ask any of my friends back then and they will agree. My husband and I were never home on the weekend because weekends were for adventures. While I had a flexible job in academia with long summers off of work, he had a job with little vacation time and substantial travel away from home. The ethos to never waste a weekend drove me to explore remote offshore islands with a newborn. The same force drove my family to ski over fifty days in a ski season with a four-year-old in tow. For two glorious summers I lived with my family in the Sierra Nevada mountains, hiking and reading. I carried my one-year-old on a backpacking trip. My blood clots reframed how I viewed my time on earth as finite and I needed to spend it squeezing the most interesting experiences out of it. I was grateful for a healthy body, so I needed to use it by hiking, swimming, and skiing. My illness gave us a new urgency and a mission really to never waste a weekend together.
Lesson three, mitigate risk, but have fun. After I recovered, I had faced death and won. My body had let me down for the first time, and the lesson I learned was to become prepared for it. Death would come for me again, that was a certainty. My husband and I both acquired multiple life insurance policies for the first time in our twenties. Not many young couples are brought to their knees to face mortality so early on in a marriage. We added simple but effective safety measures to all of our adventures, to mitigate risk whenever possible. On backpacking trips, I carried an emergency GPS messaging device with SOS. On our boat, the kids wore coast guard SOS messaging and GPS devices whenever we were crossing the channel. Scuba dives included longer than needed safety stops and conservative depths. I dove with sharks, but kept my fingers tucked away nicely under my arms. We wore helmets skiing, kept fresh batteries in the carbon monoxide alarm and had a fully equipped earthquake kit with more than enough fresh water reserves. I was going to live life to the fullest, but was trying not to croak from something that I could prevent with common sense.
I’ve heard it said that everything happens for a reason. I think the saying applies to my blood clots. My pulmonary emboli could have ended so tragically and altered the course of my family’s lives by ending mine. I’ve used the experience to live my life just a little bit more deeply, and my little blood clots had something to do with that. The lessons I learned aren’t profound, or sexy, or probably even original. I do think that the lessons I learned from almost dying at twenty-six have given me a bigger life. A life with more fun, more saying yes to wild ideas, and more adventures using my healthy strong body.
-Rhea P.
Author in Wisconsin post Pulmonary Embolism in 2006.
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