He told me to take my hand off of my leg and not to do that again.Īn estimated one in 1,000 Americans are diagnosed each year with a DVT, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I was poking my leg to pinpoint the pain for the cheery nurse who’d come to check my vitals, when the ER doctor came in. I was ready to believe him and would have, if it weren’t for that little red mound. It would take a longer flight and longer period of immobility than a weekend at Starbucks to develop a DVT, he said. He came to prepare my history for the ER doctor. It’s probably a muscle tear, the student doctor said. He told me to take my hand off of my leg and not to do that again. I was poking my leg when the ER doctor came in. I saw blue and grey shapes and a small red mound, like an ant hill. When she stepped out of the room, I peeked at the images on her computer screen. The emergency room’s ultrasound technician’s questions turned to silence as she tapped buttons on a keyboard and stared at the images on her screen, rarely looking up as she moved her wand over the clear jelly-like coating she’d smeared on my leg. I meant to sound matter-of-fact when I told my boss why I was leaving early, but it came out more as a warble. She said to go to the nearest emergency room. Recent long travel a prolonged period of remaining in the same position and red, painful, swelling were among the causes and symptoms listed. One website after another said generally the same thing: A deep-vein thrombosis (DVT), or blood clot, can closely resemble a leg cramp or a muscle tear. On Wednesday, I limped to work and trolled sports-medicine web pages. I rested, iced, elevated the leg, and doubled up on liquids and bananas, but the pain did not subside. The pain in the right calf eased, but the pain in the left calf did not. When I stood to go home Monday night, my calves immediately tightened. It felt good to focus, all that energy cleared from my metabolic cache. Sitting at a table in Starbucks on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, plugging away all day on a project, time slipped by. But several hours on a cramped five-hour flight the night before had me buzzing with pent-up energy. So, I should have been recovering with light, slow, shallow runs. The month before I had run my fastest marathon: just under four hours at the 2012 Marine Corps Marathon. It was pitch-perfect: cloudless, warm, a cool breeze. A glutton for good running weather, I could not resist the Thanksgiving-weekend weather.
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