Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) Support Group
Deep-vein thrombosis, also known as deep-venous thrombosis or DVT, is the formation of a blood clot ("thrombus") in a deep vein. It can be caused by something preventing blood from circulating or clotting normally. Join the support group if you are coping with DVT and find others who are going through the same challenges.
Hi everybody, it has been very helpful to know about this site and read lots of your posts. My name is Fernando and I feel a bit depressed and with a lot of anxiety about what to expect in the future. I was diagnosed DVT 6 weeks ago after 5 weeks with strong pain in my calf and behind my right knee. I am 37, have no overweight and do lot of exercise and sports. I don´t smoke and eat properly, lot of fruits, salads and cereals. Due to this, at the beginning of the pain, I thought (and everybody around me, including doctors) it was a muscular problem. I had been running a lot 2 days before the pain started and the I took a flight for 3 hours. The next days I had to prepare a lot of work in the computer so I passed the 5 next days seated in front of the laptop. Then was when I started to feel pain behind the knee and my calf really hard and bigger than the left one. After 3 weeks trying to recover what I thought it was a muscular injury I started to worry because it was at the same point or even worse (superficial veins were visible and the leg was a bit red and bigger). Finally I asked for an ecoDoppler and there it was: a big trombo in the poplitean vein!!!Inmediately they put me on heparin 80mg twice a day for 1 month (I was very active since the beginning of the treatment) and after that month I am since 2 weeks on Xarelto 20mg (once a day). It is supossed to be scheduled for 3-6 months more. It depends on the checking I have with my doctor in 5 weeks. Then I will have another ecoDoppler and some analysis to check how everything is going. In this time they discovered I am Factor V Leiden heterozygotic. Now I feel much better than 1 month ago, and I have started running and swimming again. I wear everytime a compression sock until my hip because doctors told me it was recommended for a better recovery. I exercise everyday, take care with diet (no salt, no sugar, no red meat and lot of fish and fruit and vegetables), drink a lot of water... But I am very worried about what to expect. It scares me a lot the moment when I will quit Xarelto. I feel depressed sometimes and it is difficult to me to concentrate in my job. My aunt died 6 months ago due to complications from a thrombosis in the kidney and PE. So I am scared...Everybody I read is his/her 2nd, 3rd or more DVT. I don´t know if it is a matter of time or maybe people fully recovered don´t write online. I don´t know what can I do apart from exercise and diet to avoid a 2nd DVT. I will take aspirin daily when I finish the Xarelto pills.Sorry for the extension, I just needed to write all my feelings... I will update my next advances. Thanks for sharing your experiences, they are very helpful to me.
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Look at what my best friend did with my picture!
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We all have 24 hours in a day. How we spend these hours is important. Watching a little bit of a video about how sitting affects us made me aware of how much sitting and laying down I do. Gonna have to work on that.Your turn. Tell me another truth.
Most people don't have multiple DVTs unless they're prone to them. And so based on your diagnosis and your family history, you may have a higher risk than the average person for a DVT. Also, some athletes are at higher risk of DVT, so it could be a combination of these factors that set the wheels in motion for you to clot. What you can do is express your concerns to your doctor, and you can always gets a second opinion on whether you should be on anticoagulants long term. But to me what's most valuable is lowering your risk, ie staying hydrated, staying mobile. And equally valuable is that you now know the symptoms so you can react and get checked out ASAP. Once you've had a clot, most doctors will take it seriously if you have symptoms again. I went to three different doctors when I started having DVT symptoms, and none took it seriously or even suggested it may be a DVT. So you are not unusual in that, because if you're healthy, they don't assume it's a DVT. That's the misconceptions about DVTs,. that only unhealthy people get them. Couldn't be farther from the truth.
Hang in there. You'll be ok.
Athletes can be at higher risk for clotting because of low resting heart rates, the tendency to get dehydrated, and the tendency to try to just work through pain. If you stay hydrated, listen to your body, keep active, and etc, I would think you'd be able to reduce your clot risk quite a lot. You can also help educate your family (some of whom may also have Factor V) to keep them safe as well. You have a lot of power in your hands right now from this experience!
And, BTW, you are right... many of us who hang out here are the weirdos who have clotted more than once. I've seen tons of people on these boards who only clot once and go back to living their lives after they are done with treatment. They aren't hanging out here.
My family got the results of the tests and all my aunts and my uncle (6 persons) are Factor V Leiden too. But none of them has had any DVT issue except my aunt and she passed away.
I would like to ask in the PE group a doubt about the PE, but I ask you too about it. Just 3/4 months before my DVT I had a pain in the same calf, I was some days walking badly because my muscle was hard it was painful, but I thought it was some injury from my exercise practice. Finally I went to the phisiotherapist and after 2 sessions I felt better and started to walk properly again. The problem is that in those weeks after that I had also a very strange cough and I had several episodes of lack of air. In those days I talked with my sister (she is a doctor) and we thought it was caused by anxiety. I had more episodes where I felt lack of air in my lungs after walking upstairs or just walking in the street. And I had that strange cough, now and then. I went to the doctor and they heard my breathing, my heart, checked the oxygen in blood and ordered an electrocardiogram, everything seemed fine, so they thought it was allergy (it was spring). So I was prescribed antihistamine and a spray to help breathing, as an asthma inhaler. But I have never had allergies to anything nor asthma. And I have had not after that. My toracic X-ray didn´t show anything strange, neither my electrocardiogram after the DVT. But now, reminding those episodes of "asthma" previous to the DVT we thought if could it be caused by some previous DVT or tiny clots in the lungs. Maybe it is crazy, because I wuld have had pain in the chest and the electro would have shown something strange. But it worries me that my current DVT wasn´t really my first one.
My sister (doctor) says that I should explain all this issues to my doctor in the next check of my DVT and she recommends to practice an ¿angioTAC? to check if there is previous clots or small infarcted tissues in the lungs that don´t appear in the X-rays... Maybe you can help me to discard the PE previous to my current DVT ¿Is it possible an asymptomatic PE? Just cough and lack of air now and then? Thank you very much!!!
But still, address your concerns with your doctor. I've had PEs, and so has TossNTurn. I think your symptoms are not specific enough to be able to say, yep that's a PE. Since PE symptoms mimic a lot of other things, like asthma, allergies, anxiety etc, it's hard to say.
Not every PE comes with pain or coughing up blood. I had multiple PEs in both lungs and my only symptom was being really, really short of breath. So, it really is hard to say what was going on with you then. It's possible you were having clotting issues, but no way at this point to say for certain. And, you're already being treated since the DVT and PE treatments are pretty much identical.
Interesting observation with the troubles breathing. After my DVT I had symptoms of fatigue, trouble breathing and fainting, but lasting a very short time.I underwent electrodiagram which showed some strange beats, but which were not observed at the E&R later in the day There are two issues here to consider 1) Stress and anxiety can cause PE type of symptoms. These can be really sneaky, and cause e.g. hyperventilation and other symptoms, and can be mistaken for more serious symptoms. 2) During DVT, the risk of PE depends on the extent of the DVT (e.g.how far up the leg the clotting goes) and the composition of the clot. PE will only occur if there is sufficiently large clot causing blocking in the veins lying close to the heart and lungs, and the chance of that is slim. There is thus always clots coming up that are broken down on the way and some may ends up in the lungs causing no effects (e.g. will be overgrown with scar tissue). Autopsy studies have shown that a proportion of the human population (cannot remember now) has clots in lungs, which in most cases have no effects at all. It is however possible that a small clot in the veins close to lung and heart may cause temporary small symptoms, like fainting, coughing and chest pain, that could last for few minutes or longer, until is broken down. It will be extremely difficult to prove this, as the patient would have to undergo lung scan almost immediately after the onset of these symptoms. It could nevertheless be a possibility. However, if the patient in on full anticoagulation the risk of PE is almost none.
They found it after it fractured off a couple dozen clots the lodged in my lungs. I had so many small PEs they didn't even bother counting them. My only symptom was shortness of breath, increasing by the day.
The interesting thing is, I think I had a previous DVT some months before, and I'm almost certain I had a previous PE that the urgent care missed. That time, I had sharp pain in my left lung when breathing, and eventual my lung partially collapsed. The Dr. misdiagnosed it as intercostal inflammation (rib pain), that caused the lung to collapse because of my shallow breathing. 3 months later, I was back in the hospital for real.