Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Most people have probably never heard of the medical term DVT, or deep venous thrombosis.
Yet it's a condition that kills more people than breast cancer and AIDS combined.
And service members are not immune.
Our medical editor, Dr. Paul Little, is here and he can tell us more about it.
Ashleigh, you're exactly right.
In fact, our own Sergeant 1st Class Pete Mayes had a near death brush with a DVT.
Here's his story.
[chuckling]
Sergeant Pete Mayes is lucky to be alive.
In fact, he almost didn't get to welcome his new baby girl into the world.
It all started about a year ago when he was finishing a 10k race.
He was about 10 meters from the finish line when he heard 2 loud pops.
It was like gunfire going off and I fell down, clutching my leg
and I'm thinking, 'I just broke my leg.'
Mayes had a classic stress fracture--a crack in the bone that with repeated stress finally gave way.
Hey, honey. Do you remember this? >>Yeah. [laughs] Nice.
The treatment--a full leg cast, which he wore for a month,
then a shorter half leg cast.
But hours after getting the new cast, he knew something was wrong.
By the fifth day, he had a knife-like pain in his right ribs
and by midnight...
He was gasping and saying, "I just can't breathe well."
And I said, "Do we need to call 911 or do we need to go?"
And he was like, "Go."
So we rushed over to Reston Hospital and he was getting worse and worse as we were going over there.
Sergeant Mayes had a pulmonary embolism, or PE.
Blood clots formed in veins of his immobilized leg
then broke off and traveled to his lungs, where they blocked circulation.
Remember NBC reporter David Bloom?
He died from a PE after sitting in an armored vehicle for hours during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Mayes says if he had known that he was at risk for a DVT
he would've recognized those early symptoms and gone to the hospital sooner.
And our own Sergeant 1st Class Pete Mayes joins us here on the set.
Pete, what's the bottom line here?
Well, it's really simple, Doc.
Patients need to get involved in their medical care.
They need to ask questions; they need to find out exactly what the risks are,
and medical personnel need to cover all the things that can happen
and the symptoms that go with them when someone like me,
who is in good shape, gets ill or injured.
Pete, thanks so much for sharing your story with us.
Good luck on your next assignment.
And if you'd like to learn more about DVTs, go to health.nih.gov and do a search for DVT.