“Mommy, I’m afraid. Tell me what to do.” The child’s mother looked up at her 8-year-old daughter. “It’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Just go get some help.”
The woman watched as her daughter left the public bathroom, where she now lay. She and her daughter had come to this store to pick up some new towels. But once inside the mother began to feel hot and dizzy. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she felt as if she was going to be sick. She grabbed her daughter’s hand and hurried to the bathroom. Once there she suddenly felt as if she was going to pass out and laid down on the bathroom floor. That’s when she sent her daughter to get help.
Finally a store clerk came into the bathroom holding the little girl’s hand. The last thing the woman remembered was the look of horror on the clerk’s face as she saw the middle-aged woman lying on the floor in a pool of her bloody stool.
When the E.M.T.’s arrived at the store, the woman was unconscious. Her heart was racing, and her blood pressure was terrifyingly low. She was rushed to the emergency department of Yale-New Haven Hospital.
By the time she arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had come up and heart rate gone down, and she was no longer bleeding from her rectum. A physical exam uncovered nothing unusual, and all of the testing she had was normal, with one important exception: her blood seemed to have lost its ability to clot. If that problem persisted, she would be in danger of bleeding to death after even the smallest cut or abrasion.
The patient told the E.R. doctors that her only medical problem was anxiety that caused occasional panic attacks, and she had recently started taking an antidepressant for that. She didn’t smoke, rarely drank, worked in an office and was married with two children. She had been healthy her whole life until almost two years before, when the exact same thing happened to her; one day, out of nowhere, she had sudden, bloody diarrhea, her blood pressure dropped and she lost consciousness. Then, when she got to the hospital, doctors found that her blood would not clot.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07wwln-diagnosis-t.html?ref=magazine
