birth control cerebral venous thrombosis Archives

Brain Bombs: Survivors’ Stories of Birth Control Induced Strokes

Published on January 17, 2023

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What does it feel like to have a stroke? We have all seen TV re-enactments of stroke and some of us have had the unfortunate opportunity to witness a stroke first hand, but few of us have any real sense of what a stroke feels like in the moments before it happens. Over the last several months, we have been investigating the early warning signs of birth control induced blood clots. Stroke survivors represent the largest group within our study so far. Their stories tell us a lot about the early warning signs of birth control induced strokes. Full stories can be read here, but since few have had any experience with stroke, especially birth control induced strokes, we thought it was important to highlight the key patterns.

Does It Hurt?

One of the more interesting questions, is there pain associated with a stroke? In some cases no, the stroke appears to come out of nowhere. In other cases, there is a clear progression of head pain in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the event.

From no pain:

Right before the stroke – I was just really tired and crabby I went to take a shower and all of a sudden I felt really dizzy. I tried to get out and lay down but I fell out of the shower instead. I couldn’t tell anyone what was wrong because I couldn’t form any thoughts or words.
…head rush, as if I stood up to fast. No pain.
My left cheek had started to feel funny. It felt like when you went to the dentist and got Novocain and starts to wear off… an irritating numbness.
I was sitting down to tie my shoe and all of a sudden, my left hand wasn’t cooperating. It was banging against my shoe…I called for my husband but my words didn’t come out right. I tried to walk to him but collapsed on the floor…I didn’t feel any pain and definitely didn’t notice any symptoms prior.
I had trouble walking down the stairs…two days later, I became extremely confused and disoriented.
I got up to use the restroom. When I got back into bed, I couldn’t lift my right leg. I tried to wake my husband, but I couldn’t speak, so I shook him instead.

To paralyzing pain:

…The headache was extremely severe, almost paralyzing. Whatever song was playing on the television got trapped on repeat extremely loudly in my head…
I felt a pain that I will not soon forget strike through my right eye and up through my skull. It felt like a white hot bolt of lightning electrocuting my brain. The horizon was bouncing when I looked across the way. Worst migraine I’ve ever had for five days straight.
I had a headache that would not quit. I had worked all day and was going to a family wake. My headache was severe and my spouse looked at me and said I was going to the hospital.
I felt a sharp pain behind my left ear followed by an intense migraine headache with dizziness, falling, nausea and vomiting.

The Lead Up to Stroke: Early Unrecognized Symptoms

If birth control hyper-activates blood clotting, surely as clots progress in size and number, especially if they are in the brain, there would be symptoms? Indeed, there are. As women, however we tend to ignore our own health, and unfortunately, so too do our physicians. So even when the pain reaches an unbearable state, and we seek medical attention, it is often dismissed.

“I may have been having transient ischemic attacks for about six months prior to my stroke…I had been having episodes of dizziness and headaches leading up to my stroke. Since my stroke I have not had any of these episodes.”
One of my legs was swollen for a month before the stroke. My stroke started in the morning while I was at work. I have chronic migraines, and at first, I thought it was migraine. After work, I went home and rested. The symptoms kept getting worse, and when I tried to get up, I couldn’t walk.
The headache started a month earlier…I also had unexplainable pain in my left thigh.
Headache responded to Tylenol for five days. Wasn’t thinking it was a stroke. Vision blurry in one eye for a few days – assumed contacts needed changing or a new eye exam. Not until speech became impaired did we jump into action and rush her to the ER.
I had a burning and throbbing sensation in my head. It was not a headache. The sensation was felt from ear to ear, around the back of my head, across the center of the back of my head. I also felt the sensation on the right side of my head, close to my ear. I felt it for about a week in January (four months prior to the stroke), then it went away. The blurry vision started at the end of February (two months prior), and by March (one month prior), the burning and throbbing was constant – all day, every day.
Electrical shock sensation down my arm. Immediate dizzy spell…Tried to get dressed and my left hand didn’t understand that I was trying to grab my jeans of the bed. I went to work. Didn’t know that I had a stroke…I wasn’t diagnosed with a stroke for six months following. They assumed I had MS. The lesion on my brain looked like MS…

Clotting Disorders and Birth Control

One of the more striking patterns that we saw across all types of clot events, was the lack of recognition that hormonal birth control is contraindicated in women who have clotting disorders. None of the women in our study were tested for clotting disorders before being prescribed the contraceptive, even when there was a family history of clotting.

“I told my gynecologist that my father had had blood clots. She said, ‘That’s not a problem. The pill is only contraindicated if YOU had a blood clot.’”

Clotting disorders, it appears, are only ever recognized after one has a clot. For some women, this medical misinterpretation is deadly.

Missing the Clot

Over and over again, we saw symptoms dismissed or misdiagnosed. With impending stroke, the pain is often attributed to migraine, but as was indicated above, the pain was far and above that of a migraine.

The gynecologist told me the pain in my leg was probably just a muscle strain and she prescribed Imitrex for the headache…The migraine medication made the headache go from dull and persistent to unbearable…Over the next two days, I would take three ambulance rides, be sent home from the emergency room twice, begin to lose control of my body, and be given a very stern lecture from a nurse who thought I needed to learn how to ‘manage my stress’.
Since the medical staff at the ER originally thought it was a bad migraine, I received narcotics and Novocain shots in the back of my neck and the base of my skull to numb the muscles.

What Have We Learned?

The more stories we review, the more clearly we recognize that as women we don’t trust our intuition that something is wrong. This is often because our concerns have been dismissed by doctors in the past, or we fear that they will be. Except for perhaps those crises that happened suddenly, there were warning signs, sometimes seemingly innocuous warnings, but warnings nevertheless. Inevitably those warnings were put aside. As women, we are taught to be tough and plow through our health issues. We go to work, take care of our kids, our families, even when in excruciating pain. I think it’s time we learn to take care of ourselves first. If something doesn’t feel right, we need to trust our instincts, and be persistent in advocating for our own health.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

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This article was published originally on October 5, 2016. We subsequently lost funding to finish this study. Nevertheless, we are still accepting stories about birth induced blood clots. If you’d like to share your story, send us a note: Write for us. Other stories and articles about birth control and blood clots can be read here.

Image created in Canva with AI; property of Hormones Matter.

Stroke Caused By the Birth Control Pill

by J.H.

Published on June 13, 2016

2146 views

I thought I was safe using the birth control pill. Even though I was older than the typical birth control pill user, my doctor felt that the newer low dose pills were safe enough for me. I had been using birth control pills off and on for about 10 years, but leading up to my wedding in February, 2012, I switched to a new brand, Kariva. The pill I had been using previously was making my migraines worse, and they seemed to be a bit better on Kariva.

A few days before my wedding, I noticed that my leg was swollen. I had an ultrasound test to look for a clot, but nothing was found. After our wedding, my husband and I flew to his hometown for a second reception. The day after the two-hour return flight I went back to work. That was the day that I had my stroke. It started in the morning with a headache that felt like another one of my chronic migraines. I took my usual remedies of Sudafed and either Aleve or Excedrin Migraine to dull the headache so I would be able to work. I spent a good part of that day writing a customer report, and noticed I was making a lot of typing errors.

At the end of the work day I went home and went to bed to rest. My head didn’t feel right, so my husband called an ambulance about 7 pm. They didn’t see anything noticeably wrong. My husband called the ambulance again about an hour later when I could no longer walk. My left leg was paralyzed. We went to a nearby hospital, and they discovered I was having a stroke. I had a CT scan and an MRI. I don’t remember any of this as I was unconscious. Due to the nature of the stroke, a sagittal venous sinus thrombosis, they felt they did not know how to treat the stroke. This type of stroke is thought to be quite unusual. They sent me to another hospital downtown (by helicopter). That hospital sent me to St. Joseph Medical Center / Barrow Neurological Institute the next day.

Starting at my frontal lobe, and going through the parietal lobe, my main brain drain vein had clotted. Blood was leaking into my brain all along the vein since the blood couldn’t drain. There was damage to both the left and right sides of the brain, and my brain had swollen. I was first given heparin, then warfarin. I was in ICU for about eleven days, until my brain was not swollen anymore. Then I was moved over to the acute rehab ward for another month. I continued rehab, all three flavors, physical, occupational and speech at St. Joseph’s Outpatient Rehabilitation, until my allotted 60 hours of therapy from insurance was used up. I continued going to the Neuro-Rehab clinic again the next year when I started over with the 60 hours of therapy. My neurologist was of the opinion that my stroke was most likely caused by the birth control pill.

I had to learn how to write again, dress and shower myself, and most importantly walk. My entire left side was not functioning at first, but my left arm came back rapidly. I had to be able to walk a certain distance using a walker before I went home. It felt like I had been gone from home forever! I am still working on my rehab four years later. The left side paralysis resolved into left side weakness at the in-patient rehab hospital. I continue to perform exercises at home (physical and cognitive), and I am walking without a cane now.

I returned to driving with the help of a specialized occupational therapy company that works with disabled people, at about six months after my stroke. My visuospatial abilities were affected by the stroke, and I had to learn how to react fast enough, keep my car in the center of the lane, and pay attention to everything going on around me.

I had significant problems with my executive brain function and fatigue. I saw a speech therapist for about 3 years. In addition, I took classes at a local community college, one class per semester. I graduated last week from a certificate program in Database Management. Prior to the stroke, I was an engineer at a manufacturing company. My ultimate goal is to go back to work.

Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

Lucine Health Sciences and Hormones Matter are conducting research to investigate the relationship between hormonal birth control and blood clots. If you or a loved one have suffered from a blood clot while using hormonal birth control, please consider participating. We are also looking for participants who have been using hormonal birth control for at least one year and have NOT had a blood clot, as well as women who have NEVER used hormonal birth control. For more information or to participate, click here.

A Stroke From Hormonal Birth Control: Part 3

by Kerry Gretchen

Published on March 31, 2016

2922 views

When I was 28 years old, I had a massive stroke (a cerebral venous thrombosis in the sagittal sinus area) from a combination of birth control pills and a fairly common clotting disorder, Factor V Leiden. For more of this story, see Part 1 and Part 2.

Trying to Look Normal

One of my final tests in outpatient rehabilitation was to walk around town without falling down or getting lost. The day I passed that test was also the first day that I went somewhere in public by myself. It was a Subway and I stood in line, my heart pounding. I stared up at the menu to keep from looking around me, trying to ignore the sensation that everyone was staring at me. I was also desperately trying to remember how to order things, pay for things, and appear normal. In my head, I practiced ordering my sandwich over and over. I felt like if I made even a tiny mistake that everyone would be able to tell how broken I was, like they could somehow see the brain damage. I’ve never forgotten that feeling and for a long time I was afraid to tell people about the stroke, scared they would look at me differently. But really I was the one who looked at myself differently. I saw myself as broken. Like my body had failed me. And for a long time I didn’t trust my body.

Living With Fear

What no one tells you about life after something like a stroke is the ongoing fear. I’m going to be on blood thinners, which increase my risk for bleeding out, for the rest of my life. The first time I cut myself, I thought I might die. Panic overtook me and I started sobbing, a paper towel clutched to my finger, too afraid to look at the damage. When I finally peeked and found it was just a nick, I felt like an idiot. But I still avoid melons and gourds, instead buying my butternut squash pre-cut. Just in case.

The first time I had a cold, I thought my sinus headache might be another stroke. The first time I pulled a muscle, I thought I might have a DVT (deep vein thrombosis). The first time I had an asthma attack, I was scared I had a PE (pulmonary embolism). If I hit my head on something, which I’m prone to given how klutzy I am, I would wonder if I might suffer another stroke. After all, the doctors said that once having suffered a stroke, my risk for another was that much greater. At least 25-35% of stroke victims suffer a second. Recurrent strokes often have a higher rate of death and disability because parts of the brain already injured by the original stroke may not be as resilient.

Stressing About Stress- Oh, The Irony!

But those aren’t the only things that scare me. I also worry about stress. When I had the stroke, I was newly married and had moved away from my family for the first time so that my husband could attend graduate school. Before we moved, I had a challenging and exciting career, an identity, and a network of friends and colleagues in a large, diverse city. The small college town in the deep south felt like a foreign country—one where I was known only as “Josh’s wife.” When I had the stroke, I had no close friends and for the first time since I was 16 years old, I was unemployed and having no luck finding work. I was under more stress than I had ever been at that point in my life. Until now.

In the past six months, I’ve been going through a tremendously stressful period. I’ve been tested not by one of the major life stressors, but several at once. And I only recently realized that part of the overwhelming anxiety associated with these situations is the nagging fear that my body “fails” me when I am under so much stress. I’m terrified that I might have another stroke. Because now I actually know what having a stroke means. It means more fear, frustration, stress, self-doubt, identity crisis, feeling helpless, being helpless—and that’s only if you survive.

Getting Off the Blame Train

The on-going message from my doctors, armed with studies funded by the drug manufacturers, was that I was an anomaly. That what happened to me almost never happens. So I figured I must be weaker than other women. My body couldn’t handle birth control pills when millions of other women have no problem with them. At least that’s what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe.

The consequence of that line of reasoning is that I blamed myself, something I didn’t even realize until I was in a yoga class last year.

When my teacher said, “Forgive yourself for something you think you did wrong,” I wondered what that might be. Then a voice came to me very clearly. “You blame yourself for your stroke,” it said. I sat with that sentence and turned it over in my head, looking at it from all directions. I did blame myself. And I had been blaming myself for nearly 10 years.

I thought writing my thesis had helped close the chapter on what happened to me. But somehow it only reinforced the narrative that I was weak and couldn’t trust my body. Really, I had been living in fear and babying myself for nearly a decade. After class, I made my way to my car, buckled my seatbelt, and cried all the way home.

The repercussions of having a stroke at 28 caused by hormonal birth control and a common clotting disorder still affect me today, in big decisions and little ones—from switching to a new blood thinner (so I no longer have to give myself shots) to wearing a helmet while biking around my neighborhood (since I can’t really afford another brain injury). I may have to live with the fear of having another stroke and the fear of bleeding out. I may have to get my blood checked every six months, wear a medic alert bracelet, use compression socks. But I don’t have to blame myself. The stroke was not my fault. I was failed by a greedy pharmaceutical industry, a society that values profit more than human life, and an overworked and under-informed medical community.

A New Story

I’ve learned that we are the product of the stories we tell ourselves and I have been telling myself the wrong story. I was not failed by my body. I was not weak because I had a stroke. The real story is that I am strong. Unbelievably strong. My body survived a stroke. For a month! My body survived being given medication that should have killed it. My body survived being sent home from the emergency room twice, massive seizures, clots, bleeding, and brain damage. My body recovered. And I am thriving. I am not weak. In fact, I’m stronger than ever and I’m ready to finish the work that I started back in graduate school. I’m ready to stand up and fight for the health and safety of women. And I’m not alone.

These first three articles are just the beginning of my research and exploration of the dangers of hormonal birth control, as well as other women’s health topics. I hope you’ll keep coming back to learn and share what I’ve found. Because despite what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe, we ARE strong. And we are even stronger when we work together.

Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

Lucine Health Sciences and Hormones Matter are conducting research to investigate the relationship between hormonal birth control and blood clots. If you or a loved one have suffered from a blood clot while using hormonal birth control, please consider participating. We are also looking for participants who have been using hormonal birth control for at least one year and have NOT had a blood clot, as well as women who have NEVER used hormonal birth control. For more information or to participate, click here.

A Stroke from Hormonal Birth Control: Part 2

by Kerry Gretchen

Published on March 24, 2016

3550 views

When I was 28 years old, I had a massive stroke (a cerebral venous thrombosis in the sagittal sinus area) from a combination of birth control pills and a fairly common clotting disorder, Factor V Leiden. You can read the first part of my story here.

Recovering from a Stroke

The repercussions of what having a stroke meant began to sink in after I was moved out of the intensive care unit.

Once in a regular hospital room, a therapist came by to do some tests. She pulled my blankets aside and asked me if I could take off my sock. This test seemed ridiculously easy, but I was willing, just happy that my head no longer hurt. I leaned forward and confidently pulled the sock off my foot. “Great,” she said. “Now put it back on.” So I put the sock back on my foot. Only I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. I stared at the sock in my hand and then I stared at my foot, knowing that I should be able to complete such a simple task, yet unable to.

This was the first of thousands of tests during my recovery. And it was the first of a thousand times when I knew I used to be able to do something that I could no longer do. It is one of the strangest sensations I have ever experienced.

I spent a week in the hospital and another week in an in-patient rehabilitation facility. Before I was discharged to go home (for another month of out-patient rehab), the psychologist told me that things would feel like “Christmas at the mall” instead of say, an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. It was an appropriate analogy for how overwhelming everyday life would be and one that I would come to understand the first time I broke into sobs when I dropped a bowl of cereal on the floor. I was cautioned against trying things like swimming alone, as I might not remember how and accidentally drown myself. They also told me that I had lost millions, maybe billions, of brain cells that I would never get back. And that I might never be able to work a “real” job again.

At home, I set about re-learning things like how to hook my bra, tie my shoes, and wash my own hair. Once I mastered these, I began to wonder what else I could do. I was extremely lucky that I made progress every day, but some days it felt like I’d never be back to normal. I wasn’t sure what normal even was anymore. After the warning from the psychologist, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to handle a full-time job. And because of the seizures, I could not drive for six months which was devastating and isolating, especially for someone as independent as I had always been. Since I was stuck at home, it seemed like a good time to force myself to relearn math (yet another thing I knew I had been good at but could no longer do). I began to study for the GRE and less than six months later, I was accepted to graduate school.

Searching for Answers

When it came time to write my thesis, I decided to use my stroke as an inspiration for my research. I wanted to know why I had had a stroke, why no one had ever told me the risks involved with taking hormonal birth control, why I never knew there was a possibility that I had a clotting disorder which would greatly increase my risk. In short, I was looking for a smoking gun; someone or something I could point my finger at and say, “Aha! That is where the breakdown occurred. This is who should be blamed!”

But what I found was much more complicated. What my doctors had told me, that I was an anomaly, seemed to be supported by the research that I found. Studies show that most people get a blood clot within a year of starting hormonal birth control. Mine happened 10 years later. I learned that Factor V Leiden is fairly common but that women aren’t tested for it before being prescribed hormones because testing that many women would be expensive. I also found research that said pregnancy is more dangerous than birth control.

Putting aside the false dichotomy that the only two choices a woman has are to be pregnant or be on hormonal birth control, the message I took away from all of my research was that my stroke was an acceptable risk to save countless women from pregnancy. That even though my stroke could have been prevented by a simple blood test before I was even prescribed birth control pills, my value as a human woman was not worth the greater expense. As a child of the 80s and a product of American capitalism, this didn’t shock me as much as it probably should have. After all, I lived in a world of the Ford Pinto. What I didn’t realize at the time and would only come to understand years later, was that I began to internalize the blame for what happened to me. Maybe it was my fault for not knowing the dangers, for not understanding the risks, for being so stressed out that my body failed me.

Was It My Fault?

In researching my thesis, I discovered that pharmaceutical companies intentionally make the risk communication in advertising, and especially in the package with the birth control, dense and confusing. And I also found that women who have taken hormonal birth control don’t adequately understand the potential side effects, nor do they even know the symptoms of blood clots. There is very little accurate information about clotting disorders online. Even if my situation was rare, these facts are extremely troubling. But what I have since come to learn is that my stroke was actually not so rare.

Recently I’ve been contacted by an amazing group of people; researchers, families who have lost their daughters to hormonal birth control, fellow survivors, writers, and scientists. They’ve helped make it clear to me that I’m not just an anomaly. As you can see from the other stories on this site, hormonal birth control has very real, very harmful risks. And we have lost far too many amazing young women to stand idle any longer. Our standard must be higher than accepting these women’s lives as collateral damage. Together with this group of health advocates, we are embarking on a journey to give women what they need-information to make the right choice for them. Because what happened to me was not my fault. It’s time to stop blaming myself. Yet even as I write these words, I still have some doubt. And that doubt shows me that I haven’t fully recovered from my stroke yet. I still have work to do on this journey. And that work may take me the rest of my life. For more on what long-term recovery from a traumatic brain injury looks like, see Part 3 of the series.

Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

Lucine Health Sciences and Hormones Matter are conducting research to investigate the relationship between hormonal birth control and blood clots. If you or a loved one have suffered from a blood clot while using hormonal birth control, please consider participating. We are also looking for participants who have been using hormonal birth control for at least one year and have NOT had a blood clot, as well as women who have NEVER used hormonal birth control. For more information or to participate, click here.

A Stroke from Hormonal Birth Control: Part 1

by Kerry Gretchen

Published on March 15, 2016

4401 views

Stroke from hormonal birth control - Kerry Gretchen

I opened my eyes and saw my husband, Josh, holding my hand, looking very serious. He was telling me that we would get through this, that even if I had to learn to walk again, that whatever it took, we would be okay. I remember thinking, “It’s okay, honey. I just have a headache.” We had been married for a year. The next time I opened my eyes Josh was leaning over me. I was on my side in the emergency room and the doctor had just asked him to hold me steady while he gave me a spinal tap to check for meningitis. Josh held me so firmly, terrified by the risks of a misplaced needle, that his arms were shaking from the strain. I tried to tell him, “Don’t worry about holding me. I can’t move anyway.” I had lost the use of my limbs hours before, maybe even days. And now it seemed my power of speech was gone, as well.

The headache had started a month earlier. I remember exactly when because it woke me in the middle of night and I had never had that happen before. We were visiting friends in New York right before Christmas. I got up and took some ibuprofen and didn’t give it much more thought. But it never really went away. I saw a chiropractor. I took more ibuprofen. I checked out a book on meditation. By the time I saw a gynecologist, I also had an unexplainable pain in my left thigh. The gynecologist told me the pain in my leg was probably just a muscle strain and she prescribed Imitrex for the headache, a migraine medication that shrinks the blood vessels in the brain.

The migraine medication made the headache go from dull and persistent to unbearable. I visited a health clinic where the doctor suggested an appointment with a neurologist the following week. That night my left arm started to go numb. I called a local pharmacist who said it might be my birth control pills. That’s crazy, I thought. I’ve been on them for 10 years. I slept on the couch because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to move to the bedroom. The music that had been on the television roared in my head like it had been trapped there on repeat. The next day I called the health center again and they told me to go to the emergency room.

Over the course of the next two days I would take 3 ambulance rides, be sent home from the emergency room twice, begin to lose all control of my body, and be given a very stern lecture by a nurse who thought I needed to learn how to “manage my stress.”

The spinal tap in the emergency room was not the first time Josh had to hold me down. Earlier that day, he tried to restrain me while my body thrashed wildly. During the seizure, I told myself that if I just calmed down, it would stop. It must all be in my head since the doctors said it was just a “tension headache.” We locked eyes, both of us terrified of what was happening to me. When the shaking finally subsided, he asked me if he should call 911. Again. All I could do was nod.

I did not have meningitis. There were blood clots in my brain and because they had not been treated right away, one of the veins in my head had burst and was bleeding. I was having a massive stroke.

Later, Josh would tell me about overhearing the neurologist and the neurosurgeon arguing. The neurologist thought they should operate. The neurosurgeon thought it was too risky. Neither wanted to be there. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. day. (I have since learned never to get sick on a holiday weekend.) In the end, they didn’t operate. I don’t remember exactly when they told me that I had had a stroke. But I know I had no understanding of what that meant. (I find that even now, ten years later, I am still learning.) As far as I knew, that was something that happened to old people. I was 28 years old.

At some point, they told me that I had a clotting disorder and that this genetic anomaly coupled with the hormones in my birth control had caused my stroke. This wouldn’t mean much to me until after I learned how to walk again, do math again, shave my own armpits again.

Not long after I was discharged from the hospital, I had an allergic reaction to the anti-seizure medication. I returned to the emergency room at the request of my neurologist. This time they immediately took me to an examination room. When the doctor walked in, the same doctor who had finally diagnosed my stroke, he said, “I’m so glad to see you. I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

That statement stayed with me throughout my recovery. Because though intellectually I understood that the stroke could have killed me, I never really understood the gravity of the situation until he said that to me. And it made me begin to really consider what happened to me and why.

I was first prescribed birth control pills at the university health clinic my freshman year of college. I wasn’t even sexually active at the time, it just seemed like a rite of passage. Why did no one tell me about the dangers of the pill? I wondered. And why didn’t anyone tell me that I could have a clotting disorder without knowing it? How many other women have this clotting disorder? How many other women have had blood clots? How many have actually died from hormonal birth control? Throughout my recovery, I struggled with these questions. Eventually, I even tried to answer some of these questions with my master’s thesis. For more on my recovery and thesis work, see Part 2 of A Stroke from Hormonal Birth Control.

Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

Lucine Health Sciences and Hormones Matter are conducting research to investigate the relationship between hormonal birth control and blood clots. If you or a loved one have suffered from a blood clot while using hormonal birth control, please consider participating. We are also looking for participants who have been using hormonal birth control for at least one year and have NOT had a blood clot, as well as women who have NEVER used hormonal birth control. For more information or to participate, click here.

birth control cerebral venous thrombosis

Does It Hurt?

From no pain:

To paralyzing pain:

The Lead Up to Stroke: Early Unrecognized Symptoms

Clotting Disorders and Birth Control

Missing the Clot

What Have We Learned?

We Need Your Help

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Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

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Trying to Look Normal

Living With Fear

Stressing About Stress- Oh, The Irony!

Getting Off the Blame Train

A New Story

Real Risk Study: Birth Control and Blood Clots

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Recovering from a Stroke

Searching for Answers

Was It My Fault?

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