And Then Things Got Weird...

In case you didn't read the last post, let me start with this:  Both Lauren and the baby are doing great. Other than some continued nausea and fatigue, things are under control, but that unfortunately hasn't been the case for the entirety of the pregnancy.  Let me explain.

Everything started off smoothly, with the major exception of a wicked case of morning sickness, until we hit week 8.  It was Thursday of that week and Lauren was at work charting when she started to feel some very mild discomfort in her eye.  She also started to notice some blurriness in the vision in her left eye, but she chalked it up to just being tired.  Those of you that know Lauren well are quite familiar with her need for a substantial amount of sleep, so add pregnancy to the equation and you can understand why she might be more than just a little groggy.

It wasn't until she met me for dinner that night that we began to think that something might be wrong. She was telling me about her day and mentioned her eye.  As she described the blurriness of vision in that eye, something didn't seem right to me.  Luckily, our optometrist Dr. Thomas, is open late on Thursdays, so I suggested we run by and see if she could take a look at Lauren's eye.  Dr. Thomas was able to squeeze Lauren in, did an exam, and took some photos of her eye. That's when realized that things were about to get weird.

The photos (see below) showed that the blurriness in Lauren's vision was due to a retinal artery occlusion. Basically, Lauren had a microclot that caused her to suffer a small stroke in her eye.  The clot blocked one of the arteries in her eye, preventing blood flow, and resulting in the blurred vision. Luckily, the stroke did not involve her optic nerve or central vision, though it came very, very close. The clot actually got stuck half way between the two.  Had it affected either one of those Lauren could have lost most, if not all of her vision in that eye.

Dr. Thomas was obviously concerned because a healthy 27-year-old should not be throwing clots at all, but certainly shouldn't have those clots passing into the arterial system where they could cause strokes.  We were now on a mission to figure out what happened and if there was a more serious issue that we needed to address.  We knew that the most likely cause of the clot was the pregnancy itself because the blood volume during pregnancy increases dramatically and becomes hyper-coagulable (clots very easy), but we didn't know how that clot got into the arteries.  (Normally clots are filtered out by the lungs as they travel through the venous system before they can get to the heart to be recirculated.)

Before we could set out on our fact-finding mission, we needed to enlist some expertise to try to make sure that no further damage would be done to Lauren's eye. Dr. Thomas called an ophthalmologist that she typically refers to on his cell phone.  We were quite impressed when Dr. Chang answered and consulted with us over the phone well after normal business hours.  Little did we know at the time, but he actually diagnosed the underlying cause of the problem that night . . . over the phone . . . without ever seeing Lauren.  (More about the diagnosis in a later post, we've got a lot to cover before we get there!)

We set up an appointment to see him the following Monday and then headed home.  Lauren wasn't in any pain or real discomfort, she just had the annoyance of the big blurry spot in part of her vision. After we got home and got to talking about the clot, we started connecting some dots that got us a little concerned.  Dr. Chang had told us that the clot had most likely passed through Lauren's entire system without issue and only got stuck in the eye because the arteries there were finally too tiny for the clot to pass through.  This concerned us because, in our estimation, if there were any other places in Lauren's body that were going to have tiny little arteries, it was going to be inside an 8-week old baby.  At the time, we still didn't know if the clot was going to be a one time fluke of an incident or if there were going to be more clots, so we decided we definitely needed to contact her OB first thing Friday morning.

Lauren was able to see both Dr. Chang and her OB, Dr. Hilgers, on Monday.  Dr. Chang told Lauren that he believed she would regain at least some, but hopefully all of her vision.  Both doctors agreed that Lauren needed to start an aspirin regiment in order to thin her blood and try to help prevent any further clots.  Neither doctor was able to pinpoint why the clot happened or how it passed into Lauren's arteries, so a battery of tests were ordered and referrals were handed out.  Little did we know that in the next three months we would become intimately familiar with Houston's Med Center...more about that tomorrow.

Thanks for reading and God bless.

-Chad