My Story of Advocating for Myself and How it Saved My Life

Happy Wednesday! Thank you for joining me here today. I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and a wellness— I'm sorry, empowerment advocate, empowerment coach. Those are the words that I'm trying to say. I help women who are going through the infertility process remove all the obstacles from their path, whether it be misdiagnosis, missed medical testing, or toxins in their lives, um, supplements that they can, um, add to their regime and improve their health and wellness. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about my story today. Part of it made it into the book, but not the full story. So, um, it really centers around medical advocacy and advocating for yourself and really knowing your body. So, um, Some of you may know I have a condition called Factor V Leiden. It's a blood clotting disorder. But the way that I found out that I had it was I actually got a blood clot in my leg. So if you back up to the beginning of the story, which is where we always should start, I was working in an outside sales position where I drove sometimes. I was driving— this particular event I drove to was 4 hours away. When I arrived at the trade show, I was not able to stand or walk. Um, just suddenly, I think I had maybe even driven it straight through, so I had been sitting the entire 4 hours, and my leg really, really hurt me. So, um, resting it did not help, elevating it did not help. Ice seemed to help it a little bit. Um, but I ended up spending the 2 days that I was there for the trade show pretty much sitting with it elevated and not able to, to put any amount of time in standing or walking at all. So fast forward, I drive home, still bothering me. I ended up in the emergency room. So I got home on a Friday night, I kind of wanted to see how it did the next day. So by Saturday night it was still significantly bothering me. So I did have a family history of blood clots, although, you know, pulmonary embolisms and things like that. So my— on my mom's side, she had some of that going on. So I went to the emergency room. I kind of relayed this medical history to them. At the time, I was also smoking, which was a contributing factor of— if you know, is a contributing factor to blood clots as well. Um, I was also on hormonal birth control at the time, also contributing factor to blood clots. I was actually sent away from the emergency room without any kind of, um, interior diagnostic, um, procedure. So I didn't get any kind of an ultrasound done. Um, they didn't do anything but a visual look on my leg. I was in my early 30s. They sent me out the door. So with the instructions just to go and see my doctor if it got worse or if I— if the problem persisted. So I did as I was instructed, and by Wednesday I had a huge welt on the top of my, uh, like right above my knee, like a huge welt. If you've ever seen, um, what it looks like when somebody's skin has been hit by a piece of leather, it kind of leaves that raised welted look. That's what my leg looked like. It looked like I had been strapped on the leg with a belt. And I was like, this is not right. My leg still didn't feel good. The welt was also hot to the touch. I know now that that's also a sign of a blood clot, and it was also painful. So that's also the sign, a sign of a blood clot. So I— sorry, I just want to make sure my audio was working. So I went to my doctor as instructed, and he kind of hemmed and hawed, and he looked at it, and he's like, well, I don't know. And at this point, I'm sincerely alarmed myself. And so I I pushed my general practitioner a little bit and I went ahead, he went ahead and scheduled, um, kind of an emergency ultrasound on my leg. So I go for the ultrasound. Now the ultrasound tech, um, it's the end of the day on Wednesday. She does a significant amount of moving, maneuvering, looking. She can't really determine anything from the ultrasound at this point. Okay, so she— but she's significantly concerned enough that she kind of does a consultation with the doctor there. They decide to put me in the hospital. So I had not— the part of the story that I left out is that I was also severely— I came to find out later I was also severely anemic from um, having blood loss because— so this was September that I had the blood clot. In June, I had my really extensive endometriosis excision surgery. So all of June, all of July, all of August, now it's the middle of September. So roughly 10 to 12 weeks, or 12 to 14 weeks, I had been bleeding since my surgery. I had not stopped bleeding, and I'm going to circle back to that in a minute. So here I am, I've come to find out that I'm severely anemic. So they admit me into the— they admit me into the hospital. They're going to do some blood work. They are going to put me on some blood thinners proactively until I can have a venogram the next day to, to determine if I do in fact have a blood clot. So that's where they inject dye into your veins. To see if there's a blockage there. So I'm very unhappy about this. I had never been in the, uh, hospital at all, and I was scared to death. So I get into my room, and the nurse comes in, and she and I are talking, um, and she comes in with a tray full of these little, you know, vials that she's going to put into my IV. So they're, you know, the little bottles like this, but she brings in about this many. Like, when I say a trayful, a trayful. So I'm looking at her and I'm, I'm talking, and just something in my spirit just said, that's a lot of vials. Like, I had noticed it was a lot of vials, but then I was like, wait a minute, that's a lot of vials, because she's just steadily putting the medication into my IV and she and I are just talking. So I said to her, Are you gonna give me all of that? And she looked at me and she looked at my chart, and I never saw that nurse again. The reason that I never saw the nurse again is because she had moved the decimal place on my blood thinner by a whole decimal point, so she would have given me an overdosed amount of the blood thinner, and there was a possibility of organ failure, brain bleeding, really bad things happening, um, if I had not stopped her. So listening to that still small voice in your spirit, or however you want to identify it, is very important in your medical treatment. Um, they ended up bringing— the next person that I saw was another nurse with an IV pole with vitamin K, which is the antidote to blood thinners. So they got me straightened out. I spent 10 days in the hospital. Turns out my blockage in my leg, my blood clot in my leg, it was so blocked that they couldn't even see it, you know, on the ultrasound because it was like 80 or 90% blocked. So if I had just dismissed, um, you know, I went to the, uh, emergency room and they just they blew me off. I'm sure everything's fine. If I had not persisted to go back to my general practitioner and then persisted with him by letting him know, hey, I have a family history of this, I think that something's really wrong, I could have— I could have had a stroke, um, I could have had a heart attack, I could have had a pulmonary embolism, I could have lost my leg potentially. A lot of things could have happened. So the other thing that we found out is that I had this Factor V Liden, which is a blood clotting disorder, very, very common. If you're watching on YouTube, there's a whole, um, whole video on it, and then there's an extended video on my group, um, the Infertility Success Community chat, which I go into how it causes secondary infertility a lot and why you really need to know if you've had miscarriage about Factor V Leiden. So I found out a few things. I found out one, I was severely anemic. Um, like my blood count was 2 points away from death, basically, and that was from the bleeding from the surgery 12 weeks earlier. Um, and then I have this Factor V Leiden, and, um, it really made a big difference when I got the whole blood clotting disorders or the whole blood clot in my leg taken care of. And then going forward with my infertility, I was able to help manage my care and insist upon getting a blood thinner very early in my pregnancies. All of my pregnancies, I had to take shots in my abdomen the whole pregnancy with the, with the blood thinners for, for myself and for the babies. So at any rate, It taught me a lot about listening to, listening to that still small voice and advocating for yourself and also, you know, asking more questions. I'm going to circle back to when I had the surgery because the surgeon actually did not. The other thing that I found out in the hospital was I had a thyroid disorder. So the surgeon did my surgery without doing any basic blood work. And because of that, she didn't detect this thyroid disorder. And because I had the thyroid disorder, I had the bleeding. When I went back to her, because I did try to go back and say, hey, this is not normal, I don't feel good, I'm bleeding, I can barely work, I'm like very weak, like what can we do about this? She was very dismissive. Now, I never went back to see her again. She didn't give me any help, but I, I— it could have ended very badly for me. Um, you know, clearly if the blood clot hadn't happened, something else crisis-related would have happened with my body. So I wish that I had advocated for myself earlier. And always, if you're going to have surgery, you know, make sure that the doctor is testing, doing basic, you know, a basic blood panel, CBC blood panel before you have any surgery done. So that's my story and I'm here to tell it. So thank you, Lord. But Advocating for yourself in the medical community is super important, and learning to do that, it can sometimes be tricky. So I don't want it to get to a point where you're feeling really, um, unwell and then you have to advocate for yourself, or you are feeling, um, backed into a corner and then you have to learn to advocate for yourself. I want you to think about ways that you can collaborate, have collaborative care with your doctors along the way. All right, well, thanks for listening today. Health and blessings to you guys, and I will see you every Monday, Wednesday, Friday here at noon. Bye-bye!