Cathleen Ross

This post is more cheerful than the title suggests because it does have a happy ending, but it’s important reading because most of us have at some time done a long-haul flight. Cathleen Ross interviews author Enisca Hasic about the time a Deep Vein Thrombosis nearly cost her…her life.

25 December 2017

One Christmas Day forever embedded in my memory.

It’s common knowledge that cancer kills, that heart disease kills. No one warns you about blood clots, how life-threatening they can be.

Stealthily forming in your leg (or your arm) when you remain seated for long hours, the blood clot is a ticking time bomb you don’t know you have inside you until the moment you stand.

That upright movement is like a signal for the clot to break into pieces, each piece travelling at speed towards your lungs, filling them with blood so there is no room for air.

And there is the real danger then — the risk of heart attack, of stroke, of death.

I am intimately acquainted with blood clots. One settled in my right calf as I sat through a 15 hour flight from Dubai to Sydney. I felt fine through the flight, no inkling of what was about to happen. Half an hour before landing, I had an urge to use the toilet, but decided against it as the passengers beside me were sprawled in their seats fast asleep. I learned later from the doctors my decision not to go saved my life. I would have collapsed in the toilet, and with the plane still on the air and no immediate medical intervention available, I would have died.

Scary, sobering thought.

The plane landed. I got up, collected my cabin bag, and immediately felt a shortness of breath. My heart began beating fast. I was now gasping as I walked down the aisle. My head was dizzy. Nausea attacked my stomach. I wondered if my blood pressure was playing up, thought to stop for a moment to catch my breath.

Next thing, I was on the floor with an oxygen mask on my face and a voice repeatedly asking, ‘Can you hear me?’

I was in pain, unable to do more than gasp out answers before the paramedics arrived. Unconscious again, I woke up in Emergency at RPA hospital. I’d had a sub-massive bilateral pulmonary embolism, the worst they’d seen, needing riskier than usual emergency treatment (riskier, as the treatment itself can cause massive bleeding). I was, they said, very, very lucky to survive both the PE and the treatment. And I was, because many, many people die from it.

If I’d known about blood clots, how dangerous they were, I would not have sat for hours, I would have walked up and down the aisle and drunk more water to keep myself hydrated. The blood clot would not have appeared then.

I hope by telling my experience that others will be aware and know how not to get acquainted with blood clots.

Rough and Ready
by Cathleen Ross

Before special ops soldier Hugo Boudreaux can move on, he has one last thing to do–fulfill a wartime debt to the friend who saved his life. He must infiltrate a vicious Louisiana MC club to stop their next illegal weapons shipment and send the president to jail. What he didn’t plan on was ending up an unwilling bodyguard to the man’s daughter–innocent and attractive nurse Alice Kaintuck.

Alice wants a normal life with a nice guy. But her rough-edged bodyguard is the sexiest man she’s ever met. Suddenly she can’t stop thinking about just how hot he makes her. Before she knows it, she’s tumbling into his muscular arms…though she’ll be damned if she’ll fall in love with a man as dangerous as her father. Only Hugo doesn’t make love, he consumes her and turns her life upside down with his carnal, erotic sex. Dreams of nice guys vanish when her enemy becomes her obsession…

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