In late September 2022, I woke up to a weird pain on my left side. I thought I’d pulled a muscle in my sleep but as the day went on the pain intensified. The next day was my first day of 2nd year (for context I’m a student nurse), I barely slept that night as I couldn’t lie flat from the pain and went to university extremely uncomfortable with every breath I took.
I rang the GP and was lucky to get the final appointment of the day. After an agonising few hours sat in lecture halls and walking between classes becoming short of breath, I finally went to the GP.
My oxygen levels and blood pressure were fine, although my heart rate was very high and I was quite clearly in pain. Since the BP and oxygen stats were okay, they were unsure as to whether it was potentially a clot or just a pulled muscle. However, they advised me to go straight to A&E. 11 hours later, after multiple tests and feeling myself deteriorate to the point I collapsed, they finally rushed me through where I had a CT scan.
The results completely shocked me and my parents, I had three big clots in my lungs with a few little ones forming and as a result, I had pulmonary infarction in my left lung, which was the cause of all the pain I was in.
From there it was a blur as I went straight to resus and had a plethora of doctors and nurses ask me questions, take history, do more blood tests, scans, etc. I don’t think anyone could quite believe it. I spent five days in hospital, two days in the coronary care unit where they kept a close eye on my heart. It had become so stressed from dealing with the clots for an unknown amount of time that it had started to change shape to compensate. Then a further three days in a general ward before doctors were happy enough to let me go home and continue my long and still on-going recovery.
Since then, I’ve been in and out of hospital for countless blood tests, heart tests and scans, breathing tests, CT scans, X-rays, the list goes on.