What happened to Anna Patton last August might seem like some intricate plot written into medical mystery shows such as House, M.D. or Grey’s Anatomy.
And if it were such a script, the first scene would show Patton, a senior in psychology, arriving at the Rex hospital with such internal bleeding that her doctor told her she would have died had she waited 30 more minutes to go to the Emergency Room.
But her story started in May, when she had a successful, routine surgery on her knee.
“It went well, I wasn’t really worried,” Patton said of the surgery.
Because Patton was taking birth control pills at the time of her surgery, she developed a blood clot, medically coined as deep vein thrombosis. The use of medications containing estrogen within six months of surgery can contribute to DVT’s development. Other risk factors for DVT include excessive sitting and bed rest after surgery.
“It was kind of a freak convergence of a lot of factors,” Patton said, taking a break from watching a few episodes of a 17-hour House marathon Tuesday night. In the episode she had been watching, one of the doctors misdiagnosed a patient with an ulcer, causing the medical team to find the cause of the patient’s illness — which was, true to fast-paced television dramas, making her sicker as each minute without treatment passed.
In this particular episode, the scripted doctors revisited the case in an attempt to pinpoint what went wrong.
There was no misdiagnosis in Patton’s case. No one predicted the freak events that led up to her arrival at Rex one August night. What caused her to lose about a third of the total amount of blood in her body, what caused her to need about nine blood and plasma transfusions from people to whom she now says she owes her life — no one predicted those events.
Patton’s doctors put her on blood thinners to prevent clots. She routinely went to check-ups and had her blood drawn so doctors could monitor her blood and make sure it didn’t “get too thinned out.”
“We started school on the Wednesday in August, and that was fine. That Sunday morning I woke up and was having some really bad stomach cramps. I didn’t think of it as a big deal, those happen regularly once a month,” she said. “I was feeling weak and tired, but I went on about my day.”
But when she parked her car at her boyfriend Frank’s apartment complex and was walking to his door, she had to sit down.
“I felt like I was going to pass out. It was really strange,” she said. “I got to Frank’s apartment and he said, ‘Anna, you don’t look well.'”
She wasn’t well. After she passed out in his apartment, he took her to Rex, where her grandfather — former associate dean of education — had built up credit in the hospital’s blood bank by often donating his blood.
Although doctors told her she had lost a liter of blood due to a ruptured ovarian cyst that could not clot because of the blood thinners she was on, she had to wait to have surgery. Just as her blood wouldn’t clot after the cyst burst, it wouldn’t have clotted if surgeons had made any incisions during surgery.
“I don’t know how much time went by,” she said. “To be able to do the surgery, I had to have my first set of transfusions.”
She had about three plasma transfusions before going into surgery to get her blood pressure back up. Plasma is a liquid in which blood cells are suspended.
By the time surgeons made the first incision into her abdomen early Monday morning, she had internally lost two liters of blood that had filled and was putting pressure on her abdomen.
“Over the course of the next few days, I had six transfusions — four of blood and two plasma transfusions,” she said. “It wasn’t until after those blood transfusions that I was… not necessarily in the clear for sure, but at least safe.”
Situations that cause people to need blood transfusions, Patton said, are common. Such events might not unfurl like Patton’s did — they could be as quick as a car crash or as unexpected as a cooking accident — but blood banks are always in need of blood donations.
Despite the need, and despite the number of blood drives student groups hold on campus each week — three were scheduled for this week alone — she said people are still hesitant to donate blood because of both a fear of needles and an unwillingness to wait in line.
“If you can donate blood, you have to get over that fear,” she said. “You have to think about how you are literally giving someone their life back.”
Since June 2008, the campus chapter of American Red Cross has collected 1,211 pints of blood — a number that has affected or saved 3,633 lives, according to Kirsten Kruhm, who works with ARC to coordinate blood drives on campus.
Rex Hospital also hosts blood drives in the Brickyard. The pints Kruhm mentioned do not include those collected from the Rex blood mobiles, but information from the campus blood drive Web site states that, since 2002, the amount of blood collected from such drives has decreased by 44 percent.
The average amount of blood collected from the 24 drives ARC has hosted since June hovers at about 50 pints, or almost 25 liters.
“We set up drives so that, each blood drive, we have a specific target amount based on what we’ve done historically at that particular site,” Kruhm said. “Talley [Student] Center lends itself to having some of the largest goals because of space and size. Bragaw has been one of our larger areas.”
Te volume of blood collected at any particular drive, she said, ranged from 171 pints to eight pints.
In the same time frame last year, Kruhm said 22 blood drives collected a total of 1,054 pints of blood. At an average of 47.9 pints of blood collected at each drive, Kruhm said each of the drives collected 2.55 fewer pints than this year’s drives.
“That means it’s growing, but there’s still room for improvement,” Kruhm said. “The demand has gone up overall — people are living longer. Our need is still great, but it’s good to see that we’re still growing and not declining on campus.”
Kruhm said each donor usually gives about a pint of blood at each visit, meaning that — at most — the amount of people who donated blood mirrors exactly the pints ARC collected.
That’s 1/25th of the campus’s population.
Although the process of collecting blood hasn’t changed recently — required tools mainly include rubbing alcohol, a needle and a tourniquet — Kruhm said the state has implemented new rules that allow donors who meet certain requirements to give more blood.
To donate two pints of blood, men must weigh at least 135 pounds and women must weigh at least 150 pounds.
“That certainly has helped our collections at State,” she said.
Patton said although she constantly sees blood drives and notices that students do sometimes crowd the drive location in attempts to donate, blood donation is “something that has to be sustained if we’re going to make a difference. Regardless of how frequently we do them, the need is going to come back.”
It is routine for people who have blood transfusions to be ineligible to donate blood for a year afterward.
The first day Patton will be eligible to donate blood is Aug. 26, 2009.
“The first day that I’m able to go, I’m going in celebration of the day that, because other people did this for me, I’m alive today,” Patton said, her voice breaking slightly. “I’m going to give back what they gave me.”