Strength

Updated version.

My name is Ky’Necia Hardy. I’ve seen this vocal site a few times on social media so I decided to give it a shot. I’m 20 years old and recently I’ve been through a traumatic experience that I never would’ve pictured in my entire life. By sharing this story I’d figured I could help someone and simply spread awareness to others. I had a pretty normal life you know? I was going to college and working at the same time along with having good friends. Life was great. I’m a foodie! I love food I’m always craving certain things and I go out of my way to sastify myself by any means necessary! I was 147 pounds at one point and I was not ashamed. Unfortunately with my diet, it causes me to have really bad menstrual cramps. My cramps have gotten so bad to the point where I had to skip school or call out of work because I was in too much pain. So I started talking to my mother and a few friends about it and everyone was recommending me to try birth control. Everyone was telling me how the birth control can lighten my menstrual cycle and my cramps will lighten. So my mother ended up taking me to see her gynecologist in the beginning of March and we all agreed that I would start this birth control patch called Xulane. I decided to do the patch because It’s difficult for me to swallow pills and in general I don’t like them. So the 2nd week of March I started the birth control patch, all I had to do was put it in my arm, stomach, or back and change it once a week. The next week I caught a common cold which isn’t surprising for me because I get sick a lot. However, this time around I lost my appetite and it wasn’t common for me to do so. As time goes on it’s now the last week of March and I still don’t have an appetite and by now my mother has noticed. I just didn’t have an appetite at all, my mom was buying me all of my favorite things and I just couldn’t bring myself to eat it. By March 30 I was rushed to the emergency room at Sentara because it had been 3 weeks since I’ve eaten something. I also had trouble walking, my left leg was killing me and it was hard for me to walk, I was limping around everywhere. Unfortunately, around the time I got admitted to the hospital, Covid-19 had first broke out, so when my mother dropped me off she couldn’t come in with me, so she dropped me off and cried in the parking lot. I went in alone and they got me settled. I kept complaining about feeling mucus in my chest so they scanned my chest and found a blood clot in my left lung,(which explains the mucus feeling I had in my chest) they were wondering where it came from so they scanned my leg and found another blood clot from my hip to my knee. I was shocked when I was diagnosed with blood clots and I immediately texted my mother to tell her the news. She was very upset and so was I, we didn’t realize how bad it was. I was upset because I thought I was going to die but my mom did her research and reassured me that there are people out there that have blood clots and live their daily lives so I started to feel a little better about it. The next day I was discharged and sent home with a blood thinner medication called Eliquis and I ended up getting worse. Eliquis had 6 different side effects and I developed all of them. Loss of appetite and nausea were the ones that really affected me. We didn’t realize I was suffering from the side effects until the end of May. So from March 30 to the end of May I continued to take the Eliquis. The medication caused my body to reject everything I put in it. It didn’t matter how slow I ate or how little I ate, it always came back up. I would take 3 sips of water and it would come back up within seconds. I would have small pieces of bread and I ate it slowly and it still came back up. I recall one time while I was in the hospital I had pancakes and I kept throwing it up for the rest of the day. I continued to puke for 2 months at least 3-5 times a day, it was constant. I tried to stay hydrated since I wasn’t eating and I would puke up any liquids I put in my body. I kept going back and forth to the emergency room. I would be home for about 1-2 weeks and then go right back to the hospital for about a week and a half. By May I started to notice that I was dizzy even though I was laying down, my sister was coming to see me in the hospital constantly and she noticed my eyes moving up and down as well at a rapid pace. She alerted every nurse that came into my room until eventually they did a mri scan on me. It turns out my brain had become short of a vitamin deficiency B1 Thiamine. Because of my constant puking I had depleted my body of all the minerals it was used to having and now my brain had started to become affected by it. That explained my constant dizziness. I was put on medication for that shortly after. By June I was rushed to the emergency room for the 6th time since the last week of March nurses and doctors were determined to find out what was wrong with me so this time they said I’m staying so they can figure out what’s wrong. I stayed in Sentara for a whole month and during this time they recommended I start physical therapy. By this time I had lost about 20 pounds and I was nauseous daily. I had puked so much and depleted my body of all the minerals and vitamins it was used to having it caused me to be nauseous daily. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep I stayed nauseous. It was hard for me to talk. Physical therapy was very hard for me. I needed it because I was put on bed rest when I was first diagnosed with the blood clots and with the weight loss I no longer had the strength to walk around the way I used too. Having to get out of the bed every single day when I was nauseous all day every day was very difficult, I don’t know where I got the energy and strength from but I managed to push myself. Keep in mind that I’m dizzy and nauseous the entire time and I had to use a walker to get around everywhere due to my lack of strength . I pushed myself more than I ever had in my entire life to get through physical therapy. By the end of June I had completed my physical therapy and I was starting to eat a little bit more, at least 20% of my meals. Around this time my mother had become desperate because I was sick for so long she didn’t know what to do, she said to herself the only thing I did differently since March was start the blood thinner medication so she looked at the Eliquis I was taking for the blood clots and realized that I had developed all 6 side effects to it. She talked to my doctor about it and they both realized that my body wasn’t absorbing the medication properly and it was rejecting it, my body had gotten so used to rejecting the medication it just rejected anything else I put in my body. Because my body wasn’t absorbing the medication like it was supposed too, that meant it wasn’t working and the blood clots in my left leg got worse, the one in my left lung was still the same size. So my doctor took me off Eliquis and started me on another blood thinner Loveanox. So after a month at Sentara I was discharged and I had an appointment the next day to go see my primary doctor, when I arrived they checked my blood pressure and when I got settled into the room they checked it again and saw it had dropped significantly, my primary doctor became worried and spoke to my mom in the hallway. He told her I had an eating disorder, he said it wasn’t my fault and that it wasn’t anoxeria or bulimia but just a medical eating disorder. I was too nervous to eat anything so I stopped eating and drinking, and because of my constant puking I didn’t even have an appetite anyway. It wasn’t my fault but I was going to die if I couldn’t get it under control. He also told her I was 95 pounds and that I needed to go back to the hospital to get stabilized. He told her around this time the previous year I was 147 pounds. I was also diagnosed with Wernicke- Encleopathy which is a combination of my dizziness issue and liver problems I was having because my liver numbers were abnormal. My kidneys were working harder than normally so they were close to failing as well. So after being home for a day I was rushed back to the emergency room and around 10:30 pm that same day, I was transferred in the back of an ambulance to the children’s hospital in Norfolk. No one told me when I arrived there I would have to get a feeding tube. When I arrived they took me up to the 8th floor and they told me I had to get a feeding tube. I was so scared all I could do was cry. They told me I could wait until my mother arrived the next morning if that would make me more comfortable. My mother offered to come with me in the ambulance ride but I knew she had to work the next morning so I told her she didn’t have to go. Well the next morning she surprised me, when I woke up she was sitting right there and the nurses filled her in on what had to happen to me. They told me if I could finish 6 ensures within 30 minutes I wouldn’t have to get the feeding tube. I don’t do so well in being timed so I couldn’t do it and I told them to just give me the tube. The process of them putting the feeding tube in wasn’t the best feeling in the world. I didn’t feel it in my throat thankfully just through my nose. Everyone that knew me personally was shocked when I was diagnosed with an eating disorder and had to get the feeding tube, they said me not eating didn’t even go together, they also didn’t realize how bad things have gotten and I had a lot of people praying for me. All of this happened in the beginning of July and I would go on to stay another month here in CHKD. I couldn’t see my mother as much because I was a hour and 30 minutes away from home but she made sure to come see me every weekend. The good thing about me being in Norfolk was the fact that my dad was only 30 minutes away so he would surprise me during the week when I couldn’t see my mom. Because of the pandemic I couldn’t see my sister or any friends just my parents. I don’t remember much of my first week in CHKD, I was too sick to function but I did come across one doctor who ended up drugged me and falsely diagnosed me. He came in my room to talk to me about taking a certain medication and I told him I didn’t want to take it, he told me to think about it. When I fell asleep he came in anyway and slipped it through my feeding tube. I don’t remember any of this but my mom said I had called her on FaceTime and I was all loopy and falling asleep on the phone, she asked me how long had I been up and I told her a few hours, she also told me I called my sister and my sister said I didn’t look or sounded like myself. My mother called the hospital and I never saw that doctor again. He also falsely diagnosed me with having Catatonia after only speaking to me ONE time, Catatonia is an abnormality in movement and behavior which normally happens to people who are Schizophrenic, I was far from that, he asked me questions and I answered them all. He called my mother and told her I had Catatonia. After she called the hospital I never saw him again. The rest of my stay at CHKD went well, I was starting to gain the weight back because they were feeding me the ensure all night through the feeding tube. However on my way to recovery I did come across a few obstacles, my nurse tried to give me a bath and my body wasn’t used to the heat in the water so I passed out when I got out of the bathtub, I just lost all feeling in my legs and fell to the ground I couldn’t even control it. Another time this doctor came and told me my blood was inflamed but it wasn’t anything bad to worry about. My heart rate the entire time was abnormal, it was beating faster than it was supposed to even though I was just laying down the entire time but that’s because my anxiety was high the entire time I was there and it was a combination of my sickness. I was also severely dehydrated hydrated so they constantly had to stick me with needles 2-3 times because I always had to get bloodwork done on me, they would put IV’s in my arms and try to get the blood from them but it never worked and then the IV’s would always blow up inside my arm so my arms and wrists stayed swollen and bruised. They even had to put a midline in my upper arm because I was so dehydrated it was hard to get blood from me. They would take me on wheelchair rides and let me walk around the hallway using my walker to help get myself used to walking. By the end of July I was 108 pounds and ready to be discharged from CHKD. They wanted to get me to a stable condition as far as my weight. Two days before I got discharged one of the doctors came in and told me he felt like I should go home with the feeding tube because he thought I was going to go home and stop eating, meanwhile I was ordering doordash in the hospital bed every single day and eating everything I ordered. I told him I don’t want to go home with it and my mother said the same thing. She was the only one who believed in me. Everyone felt like there was mentally something wrong with me and it was frustrating that everyone couldn’t understand that I was traumatized with throwing up everything I tried to put in my body. My mom and sister and a few close friends actually understood me and knew there was nothing wrong with me mentally, it really hurt me because I grew to like some of the nurses and doctors and when they all stood in that room and agreed with the doctor that I should go home with the feeding tube I was hurt and I lost respect for them, but I vowed to myself that I was going to go home and prove everyone wrong. So he made us both sign an AMA form since we were going against his medical advice. I left at the end of July. In September I went to go see my neurologist to talk to her about the results of my mri scan. She told me they found something in the artery of my brain and it could possibly be a brain aneurism. I had a panic attack right there and my dizziness got out of control and I passed out at the medical building. I wa so upset, I thought I had been through way too much as it is and now I have to deal with this, she had me go get a ct scan so they could get a closer look just for the results to come back normal. It turns out there was nothing there it was just a glitch in the screen I guess, that was kind of frustrating to me because I panicked for nothing. Fast forward to now in December. I’m now 135 pounds! I’m back to my self as far as my eating and personality, right back to the happy go lucky person I was before! I do have to wait to go back to school and work because of my dizziness issue, my neurologist said I’m going to have this problem for the next 8 months to a year so I’m considered temporarily disabled and because of this problem I can’t do much but I still have a positive attitude! I have to use a shower chair to shower because It’s hard for me to keep my balance in the shower due to my dizzy problem. I can still do everything the average person does just at a much slower pace. I can’t really go out on my own because of my problem so I’m always out with friends or family whenever I do go outside. All of this happened to me because of the birth control patch! The gynecologist didn’t tell me that the birth control patch Xulane releases 60% more estrogen into your bloodstream which creates a 60% increase for blood clots! If I would’ve known that I would’ve never taken it! The blood clot in my left lung is gone now I still have the one in my left leg but it’s not as bad it was before. I just wanted to share this story to spread awareness to people! Please ask questions before you put things in your body, don’t be afraid! Don’t assume that because it’s your doctor it’s ok, please question everything! I was 19 when I went through of all this. Make sure you ask about information before you try anything new as far as medications! I didn’t know that I had this much strength mentally and physically until I went through all of this! In total I was sick for 5 months and I was so depressed because I was sick for so long I gave up on trying to survive, it wasn’t until I got the feeding tube that I started to fight for my life and I’m so happy I decided to change my mind. I really wanted to give up but I didn’t and I’m so happy I made it. Don’t take life and your health for granted.