By Amy Coons, as told to Charlotte Hilton Andersen
“Has anyone in your family ever just died suddenly, for no apparent reason?” Those were not the words I was expecting the doctor to say right after I delivered my son. Yet, there I was, just a few minutes postpartum, and instead of bonding with my newborn I was being asked a list of increasingly concerning questions. At first I kind of laughed — why were they asking me about death right after a birth? — but then I realized they were serious and wanted an answer.
“Um, I don’t think so,” I finally said. “Why?”
My son Logan was born in 2010, via a scheduled C-section. My first child, his older sister, had gotten stuck during birth, so I’d ended up with a C-section then and decided to just do it the second time around as well, rather than risk another long labor and stuck baby. My pregnancy had been textbook and so was the surgery, so I wasn’t worried beyond the usual new mom stuff. That is, until a nurse in the operating room pointed out an anomaly on my heart rate monitor.
My heart was beating erratically and a cardiologist was immediately called. Then I realized I felt a strange heaviness on my chest. The doctors decided I needed to go to the intensive care unit immediately, although they didn’t tell me why. I hadn’t even gotten to hold my newborn, and I was being wheeled away to another part of the hospital. I remember passing my husband, Dan, in the hallway and seeing his worried face.
“What’s happening?” he gasped.
I had absolutely no idea. And it appeared the doctors didn’t either. They ran loads of tests including ultrasounds of my legs, blood work and a CAT scan, but they couldn’t find out why my heart was acting funny.
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I didn’t care, honestly. All I wanted was to see my brand new baby and they wouldn’t let me because newborns aren’t allowed in the ICU. Finally, I talked a kind nurse into bringing him down for a quick visit. It caused quite the fiasco, but I finally got to see Logan. After giving birth at 8 a.m., I finally got to hold him for the first time at 5 p.m. He was perfect. A little of the weight lifted off my chest.
Back home — and reluctant to leave
The next day, I was returned to the maternity ward, from which I was discharged several days later, still with no answers about my heart. Dan and I returned home to start life as a family of four. At first things were going fine, but about two weeks postpartum I woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I thought it was a kink in my neck and tried to massage it out but nothing helped. The next morning I noticed I was having a hard time breathing, only able to take shallow breaths.
You’d think at this point I might have called my doctor, but I’d just gotten home from a too-long stay in the hospital and I didn’t want to go back unless I absolutely had to. Plus, I didn’t think it could be related to childbirth since it was so long afterward.
That night, I had a new pain, a sharp stabbing under my ribs, in addition to my shoulder. I was in so much pain and felt so breathless that I decided the most logical thing to do would be to sleep on the couch alone so I wouldn’t disturb Dan with my tossing and turning. I felt terrible, but I made it through the night. The following morning, my mother-in-law came over and we decided to go shopping. I don’t remember much about the trip but I must have been a mess because my mother-in-law told me she would take the baby home and I should immediately go to the ER.
On the drive to the hospital, my thoughts flitted between worrying about my baby (would I miss his next breastfeeding session?) and worrying about why I couldn’t breathe. I knew something was seriously wrong, I just didn’t know what.
A diagnosis that was almost too late
At the ER, I finally got my answer: A CAT scan found seven pulmonary embolisms.
Blood clots that form in a major vein, known as deep vein thrombosis, affect about 1 in every 1,000 pregnant women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When these clots break free, they can travel through the heart and become lodged in the lungs, cutting off air supply and causing the lung tissue to die. A blood clot in the lung, called a pulmonary embolism, is among the most common causes of sudden maternal death in the U.S., and even though pregnant women are five times more likely to get these life-threatening clots, hardly anyone has ever heard of them.
I certainly hadn’t. And I was dying because of them.
Yes, that’s right: I had lost so much lung tissue by that point that the doctor said I was dying. If I hadn’t gone in to the ER when I did, I likely wouldn’t have made it through another night.
My doctors immediately started me on IV blood thinners and painkillers. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if I was leaving my husband alone to raise two children on his own. I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to them.
Thankfully, the doctors caught the pulmonary embolisms in time and the therapy worked. I had to spend three days in the ICU and then two more days in a regular hospital room until I was declared clot-free. At home I had to continue the therapy, giving myself shots of blood-thinning meds into my stomach twice a day, for six weeks. After that it was six more months of oral blood thinners.
Accepting a different future
Although the pain in my shoulder and my lungs had healed, I still had wounds. I’d had to stop nursing Logan because the doctors weren’t sure if it was safe to breastfeed while taking these medications and I didn’t want to take any chances. I’d missed out on some of his earliest days, time when I could have been bonding with him. I felt a lot of guilt wondering if something I’d done, or hadn’t done, had led to the blood clots forming. But perhaps the deepest cut was that this meant we couldn’t have more children.
Dan and I had always wanted a large family and planned to have another child even when I was still pregnant with Logan. But the doctors said that any pregnancy would be very high-risk and I’d have to have the blood-thinning shots every day until I gave birth. Not only was that a daunting (and painful!) thought, but it also would have ruined us financially. Each shot was $25, so two a day for nine months would be over $14,000 out of pocket. And that wasn’t even including costs like expensive copays to the specialists I’d need to see. Physically and financially, we couldn’t have any more children. I hadn’t ever thought Logan would be my last child, and I grieved the loss of that future family for a long time. It took me years to get past that pain.
Looking ahead
Today my health is fine (although anytime anything is slightly wrong with me, they always do a CAT scan, which is both funny and irritating). I love being a mom, and my two kids are everything. I feel so blessed that I’m still here to be a mother to them — that I didn’t die in labor, or alone on the couch, or in the ER.
But the experience has stayed with me, and I don’t want any other mother to go through what I did! Every pregnant woman should know about the elevated risk of blood clots during pregnancy and know the signs. So many of the symptoms of a blood clot — shoulder pain, leg pain and swelling, chest pain, difficulty breathing, exhaustion — are normal pregnancy and new mom symptoms, so they're easy to overlook.
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