A young mother suffered severe nerve damage after suffering a rare allergic reaction to an injection while pregnant.
Sarah Bristow, from Hadlow, Kent, experienced pain “worse than childbirth” after injecting Fragmin, a blood thinner she had been prescribed because she had developed a deep vein thrombosis.
The 31-year-old woman, who is a housewife, was told to inject the medication into her legs, but after a few days, she noticed that her left leg was “starting to turn black” and she began to have difficulty walking.
She soon realized something was wrong and contacted her doctor’s office several times to report the side effect. However, she claims that she never saw a medical professional face to face and was prescribed cocodamol in increasingly higher doses to relieve the pain.
The mother finally realized she needed urgent medical attention and called an ambulance. She underwent surgery to remove the infection before receiving a skin graft and several blood transfusions.
Sarah Bristow, 31, from Hadlow in Kent, has revealed she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after developing an infection from blood thinners she injected herself during pregnancy.
After her ordeal, which occurred during lockdown in April 2020, Sarah says she was left with “horrible post-traumatic stress disorder”.
She said: “I now have severe nerve damage in my left leg, which means I can’t feel hot or cold, my children can’t sit on my lap and I can’t do things like go swimming with them, which It is really difficult.’
When she finally saw a medical professional at Pembury Hospital in Tunbridge Wells, Sarah was told she had suffered a rare allergic reaction to blood thinner injections, also known as dalteparin.
The skin on his left leg had become necrotic and needed to be surgically removed, along with the infection underneath.
Sarah, a stay-at-home mom, started taking blood thinners after contracting a deep vein thrombosis.
She claims that after three attempts to call her doctor and being tricked into using strong painkillers, she was rushed to Tunbridge Wells Hospital where she underwent surgery.
The surgeon told Sarah that they wouldn’t know how bad the infection was until they made the first incision and that if it was really bad, they might have to amputate it.
This meant Sarah received general anesthesia and was left unconscious, not knowing if she would still have two legs when she woke up.
Fortunately, surgeons were able to eliminate the infection and amputation was not necessary. Sarah said she was “forever grateful” to the hospital staff for saving her leg.
Sarah revealed doctors couldn’t guarantee she would keep both legs when she underwent the operation to clear out the infection.
Sarah was taken to hospital in April 2020 during the first Covid lockdown while she was pregnant.
The mother revealed that they first applied local anesthesia to her spine, but it did not work and she was left in unbearable pain.
Sarah was left with a mark on her neck after having a filter placed in her jugular vein for two years
After her first surgery, Sarah was told she needed to be transferred to Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead for a skin graft.
He was told he would need spinal anesthesia, something he had never received before: local anesthesia is applied directly to the lower back.
‘I’d never had a spine before and I was very cautious and asked if they could have general anesthesia instead, but they wouldn’t budge.
“Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, until they took me to the theater. They put iodine in my leg and it started burning; I could feel absolutely everything and I was crying completely. The spine hadn’t worked.
After this, the doctors switched to general anesthesia. The skin graft involved surgeons transferring skin from Sarah’s right leg to her left and then inserting 57 staples into her left leg.
She was then transferred back to the original hospital, where an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter was inserted into the jugular vein in her neck, which remained in place for the next two years.
The filter is designed to prevent blood clots from traveling to the lungs and extends from the neck to the stomach.
“After two years, I had to remove it under local anesthesia,” Sarah recalls.
‘But for two years it had become embedded in my neck, because when they first put it in I was pregnant. They tried to get it out but she wasn’t moving and I could feel it in my stomach, it was a very strange feeling.
“When they tried to take it away I felt unbearable pain, more painful than childbirth.”
Fortunately, after a CT scan showed how deep the filter had embedded itself in Sarah’s neck, it could be successfully removed.
Sarah said the worst part of the ordeal was “being completely alone” for the nine days she spent in hospital, and said having to experience and witness everything herself was “absolutely terrifying”.
She praised her husband Matthew Bristow, 31, who helped Sarah when she returned from hospital and couldn’t walk for 3 weeks.
“He took care of all the chores with the kids, he even helped me go to the bathroom; he was absolutely amazing,” she said.
Sarah now has severe nerve damage in her left leg, leaving her with a scar 11cm long and wide, and 2cm deep.
Now she wants to make sure no one else faces the same ordeal she did.
“I tried to write a report for the Yellow Card program to raise awareness about my experience, but as far as I know, I’m pretty sure the reaction I had isn’t even on the list of rarer side effects of the shot,” Sarah saying.
“I have a lot of mom friends and pregnant friends and I know a lot of pregnant women and non-pregnant people use the shots, and I would hate for what happened to me to happen to anyone else.” .’
