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Taking a Breath: A Stop the Clot Podcast is a show committed to shining a light on the dangers of blood clots and breathing life into The National Blood Clot Alliance’s mission of pushing these preventable killers to the forefront of public discourse. We will hear the stories of notable blood clot survivors like Olympic medalists Katie Hoff Anderson & Tatyana McFadden, among others, as well as the expertise of medical professionals to provide connection, empathy and resources to listeners like you. At Stop the Clot we know the patient because we are the patient. Journey through this miraculous series with hosts and blood clot survivors Leslie Lake and Todd Robertson as they, with the help of listeners like you, change the way we think about blood clots. Join us as we collectively stop the clot.
The National Blood Clot Alliance (NBCA) is a 501(c)(3), non-profit, voluntary health organization dedicated to advancing the prevention, early diagnosis and successful treatment of life-threatening blood clots such as deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism.
As individuals, we experience the world through the wholly unique and singular perspective
that we call our life.
Though we ideally get to see a good portion of the beautiful quilt-like patterning and
variety of all that the world has to offer, our lives tend to be confined to only a few
places in the long run.
The long flight was fine.
And then I remember when we were landing in Denver, as we were coming down for landing, I
felt really sick.
Like, I was just out of sorts.
And she's like, I understand that you just came back on a flight from India, et cetera.
And you you have these symptoms and she's like, I would like you to come into urgent care
right now.
When saying yes to the splendor and the adventure of a life well traveled, how do we
protect ourselves and make the most of these beautiful experiences?
How do we do our best when truly living?
They came back and
That's when I found out that they're like, you've got three pulmonary embolisms in your
left lung.
Every six minutes, somebody in America dies of a blood clot.
Isn't it time that people started to pay attention?
We're here to change that statistic.
Welcome to Taking a Breath, a Stop the Clot podcast.
An award-winning podcast dedicated to bringing awareness of the dangers of blood clots
from the clotting disorders community to the world.
With the help of many notable blood clot survivors, we are here to give you the knowledge
and the skills you need to prevent this silent killer.
My name is Leslie Lake.
I am the volunteer president of the National Blood Clot Alliance, and I am a blood clot
survivor.
And my name is Todd Robertson.
I'm the patient engagement liaison for the National Blood Clot Alliance, and I am a
seven-time blood clot survivor.
And we're here to stop the clot.
There is such joy in the freedom of curiosity and discovery.
To travel the world open to the wonder and beauty of communities and cultures you would
have otherwise never known or experienced.
However, when coming face to face with the realities of a near fatal clotting event, we're
reminded of the gift that is the lives we get to lead.
Our guest today is somebody whose ambition and joy has taken her through countries and
communities the world over.
Please join me in welcoming writer, blogger, world traveler, and blood clot advocate.
This is Sheri Ott.
Hello, I'm Sherry Ott, and I'm a travel writer, blogger, content creator.
And I've been doing that since 2006.
So I go way, way back before we ever even called it a blog or talked about social media.
But I've been covering travel since 2006.
So we're on 20 years now.
And that's my primary job.
And that also means I travel a lot.
I just got back from Panama two days ago and will be leaving again soon.
I had been working in corporate for 14 years.
Ever since I got out of college, I had moved around the country chasing my job, I would
say, and my career.
Important thing to know is that I didn't even have a passport until I was 30 years old.
So I was a very late bloomer when it came to travel, at least international travel.
I I grew up, my parents took us on road trips.
We were well versed in the United States.
But I got a passport when I was 30 and I started doing a few international trips and I
really liked it.
And I kind of caught that bug.
And around the same time, so now I'm in my say mid thirties, I also had kind of decided
that I didn't know if I wanted to be in this career that I was in, in corporate working in
IT for the rest of my life.
I didn't know if that's what I wanted to do.
My career weirdly kind of chose me.
I didn't choose it.
It's not what I studied in school.
I kind of fell into it and it was really good and lucrative, but I just felt like I needed
to take a moment to go, is this really what I want to be doing into my retirement?
And I really wanted to travel and I wanted to travel more and I never had enough vacation
like most Americans.
And I also wanted to travel while I was physically able.
Like I was 35, 36 years old.
I was very in shape.
I wanted to go climb Kilimanjaro.
Like I had all these plans and I was worried that if I waited until I retired that I may
not be able to do some of these things.
So that's kind of what started it.
And in 2006, I quit my corporate job.
I sold a lot of what I owned, sublet my apartment in New York City and I took off on a
flight to Africa.
And the plan was to do a career break for one year and travel around the world doing all
the things I wanted to do.
that was active and see places, do all the bucket list stuff kind of.
And then I would come back and figure out what I was going to do with my life.
And as you may guess, I got on the road.
I absolutely loved it.
And I found that I really loved traveling in developing countries.
I was fascinated with Asia.
And I knew within three months that I didn't want to go back to what I was doing.
But I didn't know how to be able to stay on the road and make a living traveling because
At that time, really the only thing you could do was teach English as a second language.
So that's actually what I pursued.
After my year of traveling around the world, I went and lived in Vietnam teaching English
as a second language for a year.
That would have been in like 2008.
I joined social media really early when all of that was coming out because I had time.
I was in Vietnam.
I had time on my hands.
So I got into Facebook and Instagram and Twitter at that time.
And
I also, when I took off on that initial trip, I started a little website and I called it
Otzworld.
It was just for my parents and my friends to be able to see what I was doing and a place
for me to put my photography.
That was it.
So I wrote about all of my solo travels that first year and then living in Vietnam for a
year on my own.
And I amassed people following me.
Like I didn't even know how, I didn't try, that's for sure.
because we didn't really know about blogging back then.
So that's what kind of put me into this other travel career was that, was kind of being in
the right place at the right time.
It was really different back then.
You didn't hear about these stories that often.
If I look back, I don't even know how I got the idea in my head, quite frankly, because I
didn't have any travel mentors.
I didn't see other people doing this like we do today.
I just really wanted to go explore.
So yeah, I amassed this big following.
A lot of it, I will say, was women around my age at that time who wanted to travel, solo
travelers.
I wrote a lot about solo travel.
and I was learning as I was going.
I had never even stayed in a hostel before.
So like everything was new and I wanted to share it with everyone.
It was really fun.
It was a fun time.
So by that time, 2018, I was fully a professional travel blogger.
That was in our vocabulary and that's what I was doing.
And I had taken on a little personal project years earlier that I was finishing off and
that's what was taking me to India.
So because I was single and didn't have any kids of my own and never had a travel mentor,
I had six nieces, no nephews, just six nieces.
And I decided I wanted to really build my relationship with them since I wasn't planning
on having kids.
So I started and said when they each turned 16 years old, I would take them anywhere in
the world they wanted to go.
And it would just be me and them.
And I would hopefully be their travel mentor and get them into the travel world.
So.
This trip in 2018 was my actual last, I called it the niece project.
It was my last niece project trip.
I wrote about this whole thing.
I probably could write a book about it.
It's all on my website.
anyway, and this was the last niece that I was traveling with.
This was niece number six.
So this had been going on for years.
And even though I was well versed now in traveling with my nieces, every one of them were
always, it was always stressful to take off and go because all of a sudden I had this
kid, this teenager with me that I was responsible for.
And what made this one a little bit harder was she had never been out of the country
before.
And she chose when she could go anywhere in the world, she chose to go to India.
So that was a big, big step.
And out of all the nieces, that was definitely the hardest country.
Now, I had been to India a number of times.
I had raced a rickshaw across India.
I had volunteered and taught English in India.
So I knew India.
So we take off from Denver on our flight.
And when we took off, we started having problems.
Like the flight was canceled.
We didn't know if we were going to hit our flight in Newark.
It was just a mess.
was typical travel stuff, right?
That I'm normally very well versed in, but now I have this kid with me.
So I was stressed and I was stressed for her.
Eventually running to gates and all that stuff.
We get on our flight from Newark to Delhi.
And I think it had been such a long day just trying to get to that point and not knowing
if we were gonna make it, that when we got on the flight, I had a couple of glasses of
wine because I'm like, I'm exhausted, I need to calm down.
And the other thing to note on this particular flight was since this was her first
overseas flight ever, I let her sit by the window and I sat in the middle seat, which I
never do because I'm someone that likes to get up.
whenever I wanna get up and go to the bathroom.
So I always choose an ILC.
So we get on this flight, it was like a 14 hour, 13 hour, 14 hour flight.
I have a couple of glasses of wine, proceed to fall asleep hard, which I also never
normally do on a flight, but just hard, she was out.
And I didn't think about it.
I felt like, oh, this is great.
I slept like five or six hours.
It was super.
I never got up because I didn't wanna bother the person next to me.
And that was that.
We arrived in Delhi and off we were on our two weeks of travel in India.
And probably a day or two later is when I first noticed the first symptom.
Didn't obviously realize it was a symptom.
I was completely novice to this.
And it was my calf hurt.
That was it.
My calf was sore.
And I figured, okay, there's a million reasons why this could be.
I'm dehydrated from traveling.
It's really hot.
It was like August in Delhi.
and I'm on jet lag, so I had wrapped it up to, need more water and I need time, you know,
I just need to get through this.
So we take off on our two week tour with a group of people, it was a small group tour and
the pain in my leg just wasn't going away.
But I do a lot of active stuff and I just figured it was a sore muscle, no big deal.
In fact, I even got a massage because I thought this muscle in my leg is tight, so let's
try to work that out.
And we went on.
No other big symptoms until sometime maybe a week later.
I noticed that I was laughing with the group.
We were saying something and I was laughing.
And I noticed when I was laughing that I had this little like pain in my chest.
And it kind of felt like a stitch or like just a little slight pain.
Like I had a little trouble breathing or something.
And I'm like, ooh, that's weird.
And didn't think about it.
But.
As I continued through the trip, laughing, doing stuff, I noticed this more often, like
this little pain when I would take a deep breath.
At the same time, I was starting to develop what I call an unproductive cough.
I would cough at night.
I wasn't sick, but a cough.
I chalked that up to bronchitis.
I just figured I was on my way to bronchitis and that's what this cough was about.
So all of that, and I'm also starting to have more trouble sleeping.
So when I'm sleeping,
When I'm laying down, I have pain in my chest and it's, can't get comfortable.
I really didn't think twice about it.
Like the not being able to sleep thing was a little bit weird to me, but the cough and
everything else, like I said, whatever.
So we finished our trip and we get back on the plane to fly back to Newark and then to
Denver and don't think about anything.
I'm not feeling great, but I'm not bad.
The long flight was fine.
And then I remember when we were landing in Denver.
As we were coming down for landing, I felt really sick.
Like, I was just out of sorts.
I thought I was gonna throw up.
Like, it was really weird, because it kind of came out of nowhere.
Looking back, I kind of understand it.
But I just thought it was really weird.
But somehow I held it together.
And we land.
I get my niece back on a train to Nebraska.
And now I'm alone.
Trip is done.
I'm home.
And I think I have bronchitis.
And I just...
hope that it gets better kind of thing.
However, about a day or two later, I was really having trouble sleeping.
I had so much pain in my chest sleeping and had this cough.
So I decided it was Friday and I remember thinking, you know, I probably really need
antibiotics before this weekend.
So let me try to get into a doctor because I know this is bronchitis or, you know,
something with the pollution and I can't sleep.
So I call my
insurance company, the appointment line, and I try to get in to see my primary care
physician.
And of course, you can't do that.
It's like, you could see her in three weeks.
I'm like, nope, I need medication now.
And so they said, well, let me put you on with a nurse.
So they put me on with the teloners.
I'm telling her everything that's gone on.
But at that point, I just basically tell her that I can't sleep, that I just got back from
India and that I have this pain in my chest.
and I think it's bronchitis, I've had bronchitis before, and I just want to get an
antibiotic.
And she says, well, maybe that could be, but let me have you talk to a doctor on the
phone.
And I'm like, okay, whatever.
I just want my drugs, that's all I want.
And so they put me on with this doctor and she's like, I understand that you just came
back on a flight from India, et cetera, and you have these symptoms.
And she's like, I would like you to come into urgent care.
right now because I think you may have a blood clot.
And that was the first time I had ever even considered that.
And I'm like, no, I don't have a blood clot.
I travel all the time.
I'm young, I'm in shape.
At that time I would have been probably like 47, 48, healthy.
And I'm like, no, I don't think it's that.
And she's like, well.
you know, it can't hurt.
We would just come in, we would run a few tests, et cetera.
Well, that night I also had a event that I was supposed to be going to.
And I said, you know, I have this thing tonight.
So I said, can I just come in tomorrow?
And she's like, well, you could.
She's like, but I'd really be happier if you came in now.
Let me check the urgent care lines.
And she got on her computer and she's like, look, there's no line in Aurora.
Why don't you just go in, check it out.
We run the quick test.
You know, here are the two tests that we do, the D-dimer or whatever.
and then you can go on to your event.
I'm like, okay, fine.
I was really annoyed.
And at the time also, I didn't have a car, so I had to Uber out there.
And at that time, I was also always trying to save money with Uber, so I took an Uber
carpool.
So I was in no hurry, clearly.
And so I take this Uber pool and they've got to drive me way out.
It was probably about a 20 minute drive out to that urgent care.
And then...
The Uber pool, because they don't have to let you off right at the door, they can let you
off nearby and then you walk.
He had to leave me off.
And then I had to walk like another, I don't know, quarter mile to the urgent care.
And at that point I was feeling bad, like really bad.
I remember thinking, oh yeah, it's probably really good that I am going.
So I go, they do the D-dimer, of course it comes back.
And then they're like, we need to do a CT scan.
And they came back.
And that's when I found out that they're like, you've got three pulmonary embolisms in
your left lung.
And I'm like, holy shit.
And then it was just like, everything started happening then, right?
Because immediately they had me on blood thinners.
had like, it was just, then it became really serious.
Even though, quite frankly, the risk was earlier.
But I was just very lucky.
In some ways it was being expressed to me by all the actions because they were like in
emergency mode and I was just stunned.
But yet I still remember what are the first things I asked, you know, and they're telling
me, you know, they're going to put me on this and this and I have to give myself a shot
and all this stuff.
And we're going to set you up with an appointment with a coagulation specialist or
whatever.
And I'm like, I didn't even know there was such a thing.
And one of the first questions I asked, can I still travel?
I mean, and I should.
back up a teeny bit because I was aware of blood clots from flying.
I had never had it myself.
However, probably seven years before this, my sister also had a blood clot from a long
distance flight from Singapore.
She was an expat in Singapore and she was flying back to the US and she got all the way
home and when her clot broke loose and went up into her lungs or whatever, she actually
passed out on the floor.
and recovered.
So that was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing.
So I did have this weird past history that never came up to me until they said, we found
three pulmonary embolisms in your lungs.
And I'm just like, So I knew what my sister had gone through.
I knew that she was on warfarin.
knew, you know, because it was a big, big deal.
So immediately, I think in my head when they were telling me all this stuff, they were
going to put me on.
And I was just like,
I knew what she went through having to go back to the hospital or all the time and have
the blood tests.
And that's why I'm like, can I still travel?
So they said, yeah, but not right away.
Let's just get this under control.
I don't think I fully understood how lucky I was until I started researching it more when
I got home.
They didn't keep me overnight.
They did let me go home with all the drugs and so on.
And when I started actually posting it out on my social media and stuff of what had
happened,
Then I started hearing from all these people about people they knew that had perished,
other people that had had them and had close calls and all this.
And it just like came out of the woodwork.
It was just crazy.
I often wish that I knew who that doctor was because I do credit her and the nurse who was
on the tele line for saving my life, honestly.
She urged me to go in and she did everything she could to get me to go in.
was pretty amazing.
also always have people ask me, they're like, were you scared?
And I'm like, no, because I didn't know I had anything wrong really.
And so by the time I found out, there wasn't as much to be scared about, right?
Because then they can start to get it all under control.
One of the hard things about being a travel blogger and being
content creator, whatever, is that you're kind of operating in your own little world and
you don't always know who's following you because there's a huge percentage of people that
never speak up that just follow what you do.
And I think this brought people out of the woodwork in a way, because all of a sudden they
could be like, oh, this could happen to me.
And so what happened in the years following as I always talk about this was that I was
hearing from people just kind of randomly about like,
I now travel with compression socks because of your story.
That's probably primarily what I heard.
You people who had never considered compression socks because compression socks, as I did
too, I associate them with being an old woman, basically.
I mean, that was it.
And so, you know, I just had never even considered wearing compression socks before.
And so just even educating people about that and how to
deal with long distance flights was huge.
And I think everyone now, you know, I hear from so many people now that have changed the
way that they do flights.
And I always tell people anything to, I mean, you should wear them all the time.
They're easy, they're cute, they're nice now, but anything over two hours, you need to be
on compression socks and doing kind of the protocol of getting up and walking around,
drinking water, et cetera, on the plane.
And I think probably more than anything I've ever
done or written about.
Like, yeah, I know that I inspire people to travel and make change in their life and so
on.
But this is probably the biggest impact I think I've probably had on my overall audience.
So I'm thankful for that.
And it's it has really energized me, I would say.
It's no secret that as we age, our bodies change, things become a little more difficult.
health becomes more of a concern when maintaining a thriving and robust life.
As we journey further into the lived experience, how do we take into account changes and
shifts in our body's natural processes specifically when it comes to blood clot awareness?
Here to discuss age as a contributing factor and the variations in treatment for blood
clots associated with age, this is Dr.
Jeffrey Klein.
You know, we weren't designed to be 100 years old.
and uh we are more clotty the older we get.
Although there is a diagnosis curve that trails off after age 80 because people stopped
looking for the blood clots after age 80 because they probably, you the doctors are
thinking, wow, if I diagnose a blood clot, means blood thinners and that's going to be bad
news for this individual.
So the diagnosis rate trails off, but the probable actual incidence rate increases
linearly or maybe even
more than linearly throughout life.
I trained emergency medicine residents and uh you could not get one of them to order a
D-dimer on an 85 year old.
They wouldn't do it because that's what they believe or are implicitly taught.
And, you know, of course it depends on the 85 year old, but some people would clearly
benefit from being diagnosed by their blood clot with their blood clot and being put on an
anticoagulant.
There are some that it would cause more harm than good, but
It's almost like a personal or being careful, ethical decision.
And also talking to the family, talking to the patient to the best you can, case that
unless they're living with dementia, about what their wishes would be.
What if I found this blood clot?
Would you want to take a medicine the rest of your life that can cause bleeding?
These are patient oriented questions that are easy to ask, but also easy to forget.
I present you with shortness of breath like I couldn't breathe.
Hard to explain to people because you say, I had a hard time breathing.
Not like you're working out, labored kind of thing.
This was like, literally, I can't breathe.
I never had a D-dimer.
I never had anything to be checked in my blood, my protein level, nothing like that.
So I have to tell you, our overwhelming demographic of people coming to NBCA are women in
our age group by a factor of like four.
And so many women want to travel and they're afraid to do it now.
So talk to us about, because I'm curious to hear your experience versus in my head, my
first experience, your first experience with not just getting on a plane and traveling in
the US, but long haul travel.
What was that like for you mentally to do that?
And then take the opportunity, send them a message, what they can learn from this and be
proactive, but don't be afraid.
Yeah.
And it also just kind of reminded me of how many people contact me.
I get this happening all the time about I'll get an email or a message, whatever, that's
like, what are the symptoms again?
What does it feel like in your legs?
Because someone knows enough and they flew somewhere and they got off and they have a sore
leg and then they panic, they remember my story.
So anyway, that was just another thing.
But the first time I flew, whoo.
Well, I think, you know, the other big thing, let me back up because it's not just flying.
The other big surprise to me, in addition to the whole birth control thing or the estrogen
thing, was that it's not flying.
It's not has nothing to do with the altitude necessary.
It's the setting for these long, long periods.
And so that means road trips that I've taken.
had to re-examine train trips that I've taken.
had to re-examine that kind of stuff.
And so
It's not just long distance flights.
So that was one thing I also really wanted to educate people on.
But the first time I flew, I was hyperactive as far as like, I'm gonna get up, gonna move
my legs all the time.
I'm gonna like, you know, and now I probably set my alarm for like every two hours, but
back then it was just like every hour.
And I refused to ever sit in a window seat again or anything but aisle.
That's the other thing.
So that I can get up and move around.
and so on.
And now I'm one of those people that set my alarm so it goes off every two hours, no
matter if it's an overnight flight.
That's fine.
I'm going to wake up, I'm going to get up, and I'm going to walk around doing stretching
and marching in place.
I'm one of those annoying people that's by the, where the flight attendants are and all
the drinks and so on, I'm sitting there marching in place.
But I've changed the way that I fly, even like I said, anything over two
So that's big because I do worry about it still even though you know I'm not on blood
thinners anymore they took me off and they determined that they felt like it was just
because of that flight but I'm super aware when I fly now so much so that I actually like
lots of times there'll be a woman sitting next to me or something and she's not getting up
and walking around and I'll kind of just be like hey it's a good idea if you get up and
walk around.
Absolutely.
I do the exact same they just don't know.
They don't know.
They don't know.
And a little prevention goes a very, long way.
Yeah.
And once you know the symptoms, you know, once you can educate people, then it does change
your risk a lot because you can get ahead of it.
It's fine.
So there have been a couple of times since where I've flown and got somewhere.
And in fact, this just happened two years ago.
I was in Ireland.
And even though I been
already there for a week, my legs started hurting.
And I thought, that's weird.
And so I decided it was smart to go in and have it looked at.
So I went and spent a whole day in an emergency room in Tralee, Ireland.
And once you tell them, too, you had a history of it, they treat it very seriously.
And so I waited all day, got a D-dimer, came back fine.
But like, so now I just, don't risk anything.
The minute I might have
one of those symptoms, I'm just gonna go in and have it looked at.
Which is what I try to tell people too, like your calf hurts, well, how does it hurt?
Is it a continual ache?
That's what I get a lot of questions about.
They're like, well, what exactly did it feel like?
And it's like, I just remember it felt like I had to stretch out my calf, like it was
tight.
But to be safe, always have travel insurance.
And go in and just get it checked.
It's worth it.
when you travel long haul now, you don't take an anticoagulant.
Do they have you take anything?
No.
Now I take a baby aspirin every day.
Right.
But that's the only thing that I still do medically, I would say.
All the other preventative stuff is the compression socks, the hydrating, et cetera, and
getting up and walking.
The amazing fact is that your sister also had a blood clot from long haul travel.
I know.
And hers ended up.
even more serious because she ended up in the emergency room because she, you know, she
passed out.
But it was weird because then once I told the specialists that too, I'm like, Hey, this
happened to my sister.
Of course, I'm thinking this is hereditary, but they ruled it that it wasn't hereditary,
that I wasn't at a higher risk.
So yeah, I'm still wondering about that a little bit because it's very odd that two of us
would go through that.
they test you both?
They tested my sister.
And hers came back negative, so they didn't bother testing me.
I don't know.
I spent so much time around this.
You know, I always hear the family history is one of the biggest flags, you know, of all
and just making sure you do get tested because it's so easy.
It's a blood test.
You know, when they do the D-dimer, they could have taken the test or taken the blood to
do that as well.
It's worth it just to see.
And now they're more advanced in terms of being able to identify things.
And I'm unprovoked, so I don't know why I got the blood clot, um which was a hard, hard
thing to, you know, I'm a uh
finance person by training.
I'm very analytical and I'm like, what do mean one plus one equals three?
Like that doesn't work for me.
That was very, that was very difficult.
But it's worth getting the test just to see if you have anything.
know, aspirin is great for stroke prevention, but it really doesn't do much for DVT or PE.
So one of the things that you could discuss with them is, is maybe going in an
anticoagulant when you're just doing the long haul flight to make sure you're 100 %
protected.
But I think your experience and I want to go to Panama next year and do the uh surfing and
I sent it to four of my friends and they're like, let's all go.
This is so cool.
So I think we need to organize some of like some event for blood clot women that want to
travel and do something cool.
I really want you to just to share with people that and in particular women, you can get
your life back together.
And it is about managing risks and having the information and being aware.
don't stop living, don't stop traveling, you can participate in these activities.
Yes, absolutely.
It's easy to do the stuff, the preventative tasks.
It's easy.
And that will, in most cases, protect you.
And also to educate yourself.
Like I said, the stuff with the birth control, like had no idea.
But to educate yourself on stuff like that.
So if you know that you're at a higher risk because you're taking birth control.
then definitely get up and do the preventative stuff.
Like be ultra aware.
But it doesn't mean you can't travel, not at all.
And that's why I brought up the train and the car.
I mean, I think about how many times I've been on a long car ride where I haven't stopped
for like five hours or six hours.
You're at risk here too.
It's not just long haul flights.
And the older you get, the higher the risk level as well from doing these things.
But again, they're very, very manageable.
Your story is amazing.
I'm so thankful you're okay.
But I mean, my God, the intervention of the nurse and the doctor and all these things
coming together and then having this platform to share with people so they do understand
the signs and symptoms.
Sherry, March is Blood Clot Awareness Month.
And you probably know this, but there's no federal funding for blood clot education and
awareness.
so National Blood Clot Alliance
really tries to use the month to raise awareness for the public.
And so we would love to have you as an ambassador for the month to share information about
signs and symptoms and really get the word out.
So I'm going to reach back out to you again to see if we can get you more engaged so that
we can reach people and share that information.
And it is the biggest month of the year for us in terms of an awareness initiative.
Oh, I would love that.
That would be awesome.
Thank you for joining us on another episode of Taking a Breath.
We want to thank Sherry for sharing her story with us today.
A special thank you to Dr.
Jeffrey Klein for his insight and expertise.
For more information on risk prevention and community, please visit StopTheClaw.org.
And if you wish to aid in our efforts of blood clot awareness, please consider donating to
our cause at StopTheClaw.org forward slash donate.
We know the patient because we are the patient.
Together with listeners like you, can collectively stop the clot.
For more information, visit stoptheclot.org.
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