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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.
“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.
