Penning a moving essay for CNN, Serena, who is married to Alexis Ohanian, revealed that she almost died while giving birth to their first child, Olympia.
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While Olympia arrived safely via an emergency C-section, Serena suffered a pulmonary embolism shortly after giving birth — something that she had experienced in the past.
“It began with a pulmonary embolism, which is a condition in which one or more arteries in the lungs becomes blocked by a blood clot. Because of my medical history with this problem, I live in fear of this situation. So, when I fell short of breath, I didn’t wait a second to alert the nurses,” she shared.
“This sparked a slew of health complications that I am lucky to have survived. First my C-section wound popped open due to the intense coughing I endured as a result of the embolism. I returned to surgery, where the doctors found a large hematoma, a swelling of clotted blood, in my abdomen.
And then I returned to the operating room for a procedure that prevents clots from traveling to my lungs. When I finally made it home to my family, I had to spend the first six weeks of motherhood in bed,” she added.
A few years later, Serena told Elle magazine that nurses in the hospital repeatedly ignored her as she voiced her concerns.
Instagram: @serenawilliams
“I asked a nurse, ‘When do I start my heparin drip? Shouldn’t I be on that now?’ The response was, ‘Well, we don’t really know if that’s what you need to be on right now.’ No one was really listening to what I was saying,” she recalled, later noting that a nurse told her that all the medicine was making her “talk crazy” when she asked to get a bilateral CAT scan of her lungs.
Six years after giving birth to Olympia, Serena welcomed her and Alexis’s second daughter, Adira, last August.
Instagram: @serenawilliams
And now, Serena has opened up about how she coped during her second birth.
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Speaking with Glamour magazine this week, Serena noted that she decided to have a C-section and made sure to have four doctors on call.
Instagram: @serenawilliams
In spite of how horrific her first birth was, Serena shared that she’s grateful to have experienced it. “Looking back, I’ll never have that moment again,” she said.
js-subbuzz__attribution “>Tristar Media / Getty Images“For whatever weird reason, that kind of makes me a little sad, but that’s probably a party of one. This time I went in with a plan. I like to say I put my best effort out there, and this was no different. I literally thought about it as a Grand Slam: How can I succeed?” she said.
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What’s more, Serena revealed that she was incredibly paranoid ahead of pregnancy and checked her underwear for blood — a sign of potential miscarriage — for nine straight months.
“It’s like, Wait, what is going to happen? That’s going to open? What?” she recalled thinking.
“I try to tell all my friends that’s normal, and I try to be very open with my experience and the things that people didn’t talk about with me. ‘How is that going to come out of me?’ I know it’s been going on since the beginning of time, but it just doesn’t seem to work,” Serena added.
