Risks of Blood Thinners

I left the hospital on January 22nd, 2020. It had been an overwhelming, crazy past two days. I took a week off from work to take it easy. I made an appointment with the vascular doctor for February 6, 2020. In the meantime, I was in uncharted territory and still had so many unanswered questions. During this time, I was unconsciously pushing my feeling down and burying them as deep as they would go. Although, I probably wouldn’t admit it, a lot of my actions were done out of fear and lack of information like:

• Making sure that I took my blood thinner at the exact same time each day. For someone reason, my brain was like “I am going to die if don’t take it exactly on the 12 hour mark”
• Tried to become the greatest Doctor Google. It did more damage than it was helpful.
• Paranoid about the bleeding out especially the head.

When I was in the emergency room for the very first time on January 21, they really emphasized the importance of ” if you experience a head injury make sure you go to the ER to make sure you don’t have any internal bleeding.” There was so much information coming at me that I kind of blacked out because it is so much to process. Because it was all new to me, I needed the doctors to be as specific as possible. To me you can’t just say head injury- like there is some much left to the interpretation. It’s like baking a cake. I needed the doctor to tell me what to put the oven at, the ingredients, how long to bake it. Part of the cry for excessive information was due to the lack of information that they couldn’t provide in other areas of my diagnosis.

That lack of information caused me another ER visit. On February 3rd, 2020, I was visiting my boyfriend in Chattanooga. We went over to his parent’s house to watch the 49ers play the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super bowl. My boyfriend had a Nissan Titan Truck and you need to step up to get it. When I was getting into the truck , I went too far and bumped my head on the roof of the car door. No, I didn’t blackout or loss consciousness. However, only thing my brain could think was ” OMG, is my brain internally bleeding. Does bumping your head count as a head injury? How sensitive really is this blood thinner? ” I tried to reason with myself but the intrusive thoughts were stronger. To be on the safe side and calm my anxiety, I made my boyfriend take me to emergency room.

It was 11:00PM at night when we arrived to the ER room. I get checked in and they took me back. My anxiety was high. The doctor came and I explained that I new to blood thinner and bumped my head on the car door. This was the interaction that I had with the doctor:

Doctor: Did you lose consciousness, seeing double vision, experience slurring word or change in speech?

Me: No

Doctor: I think you are fine then

Me: Oh okay. I just wanted to check because I am new to this blood thinner thing and wasn’t sure * embarrassed that anxiety talked me into coming , but at the same time was relieved*

The good news was we spent only an hour there. I got discharged and went home. I am glad I was wrong than doing nothing, but something being wrong. What I learned in this scenario was the importance of asking in-depth questions even if they are weird or bizarre to help give me the tools to understand better risk of the medication I was taking.