The official record reads:

Unusual bleeding.

Two words.

Small enough to fit neatly inside a medical chart.

Far too small to describe what was happening to me.

This was not a bad period.

This was not simply “heavy bleeding.”

This was my body losing blood until breathing itself became terrifying.

By the time I reached the Emergency Department on June 14, 2025, my hemoglobin had fallen to 4.1 g/dL.

And I could feel every bit of what that number meant.

The closest comparison I have is drowning.

Except somehow, this felt worse.

When you are drowning, every instinct in your body is screaming for the surface. You fight upward, break through the water, open your mouth—and finally there is air.

That first desperate breath is supposed to bring relief.

But imagine fighting your way to the surface, opening your mouth as wide as you can, dragging in everything your lungs can hold—

and getting almost nothing.

A tiny fraction of a breath.

Just enough to stay conscious.

Not enough to make the panic stop.

So you try again.

And again.

And again.

My chest would rise.

My lungs would expand.

I knew air was going inside me.

But the relief never came.

I could take a breath and immediately need another one.

It was as though my body had forgotten how to satisfy its own need for oxygen.

Breathe in.

Still starving.

Breathe deeper.

Still starving.

Again.

Still not enough.

There was nowhere to surface.

That was the terror of it.

I wasn’t underwater.

I was standing in my own home, surrounded by ordinary air, and yet my body felt like it was suffocating in plain sight.

My heart hammered against my ribs, desperately trying to compensate for what was disappearing from my bloodstream.

Walking a few feet felt like climbing a mountain.

Standing became work.

The shower became terrifying.

I remember the exhaustion of simply taking off my clothes. My hands were shaking. My legs felt weak beneath me.

Then, standing under the water, the edges of my vision began disappearing.

Blackness closed inward.

Bright stars exploded across what remained.

My heart was pounding.

My lungs were begging.

And suddenly there was a terrible clarity:

My body could not keep doing this.

I could collapse right there on the tile.

And I did not know if I would wake up.

That is what unusual bleeding looked like from inside my body.

My red blood cell count was 2.12 M/uL.

My hematocrit was 14.6%.

My hemoglobin was 4.1.

Those were not just abnormal numbers highlighted on a laboratory screen.

They were the explanation for why I could breathe and still feel like I was drowning.

The bleeding itself had become impossible to contain with ordinary menstrual products.

Large clots were leaving my body with a force and volume that frightened me.

Eventually, I resorted to wearing an adult brief simply because I had run out of practical ways to manage the blood.

Later, the medical record reduced that reality to one sentence:

“Today she is wearing a diaper.”

Technically true.

But completely incapable of telling the story.

It did not explain that I was wearing it because my body was hemorrhaging faster than ordinary products could contain.

It did not explain the humiliation of looking down and seeing that much blood.

It did not explain trying to clean myself while barely having the strength to remain upright.

It did not explain what it feels like to become afraid of your own bathroom.

Or your own body.

Or the next time you stand up.

And it did not explain the question quietly running through my mind every time another clot left my body:

How much more can I lose?

By the time I reached Bethesda West, the staff moved quickly.

IV fluids.

Blood work.

Type and cross.

Hospitalization.

Critical care.

Blood transfusion.

I had spent my career in hospitals.

I knew the difference between a busy room and a room that had suddenly become serious.

I recognized the shift.

For years, I had been the healthcare worker standing beside the stretcher.

Now I was lying on it.

I had built my career around being useful in emergencies.

As a CT technologist, I was accustomed to long shifts, trauma patients, heavy transfers, rapid decisions, and remaining calm while someone else’s life was suddenly falling apart.

Now I was the emergency.

And then someone said the number aloud.

4.1.

That number terrified me because I understood enough to know that what I had been feeling was not weakness, anxiety, or an especially miserable menstrual cycle.

My body was in profound distress from blood loss.

Then came the ultrasound.

For the first time, there was an image connected to the nightmare.

A posterior lower uterine segment fibroid measured approximately 4.6 centimeters.

My endometrium measured 11 millimeters.

A complex left ovarian cyst was also documented.

There was visible vascularity within the uterus.

Finally, there was something measurable behind what my body had been screaming.

There was anatomy.

There were numbers.

There was blood loss.

There was proof.

But lying there, I was not thinking about measurements.

I was thinking about breathing.

I was thinking about whether my heart could keep doing this.

I was thinking about how strange it felt to be completely conscious while my own body struggled so violently to keep me alive.

Then the first unit of packed red blood cells began moving down the tubing toward my arm.

Slowly, I felt something I had almost forgotten.

Air.

A real breath.

For the first time, my chest expanded and the breath actually seemed to reach somewhere.

The desperate drowning sensation began to loosen its grip.

It felt like I had spent hours clawing toward the surface of dark water, breaking through again and again only to find almost no air waiting for me.

And suddenly, finally—

I could breathe.

The blood was giving life back to me.

But what I did not understand yet was how temporary that relief would be.

Because the thing bleeding me was still inside my body.

The fibroid had not disappeared.

It was still there—vascular, demanding, feeding from the same blood supply my body desperately needed to survive.

And in the way I came to experience what happened next, every transfusion felt like more than replacing what I had lost.

It felt like I was being refueled—

and so was the thing trying to drain me.

The image stayed with me.

They would hang blood.

My heart would settle.

My lungs would finally fill.

Life would begin moving back into my hands, my legs, my brain.

And somewhere inside me, that fibroid felt as though it came alive with it.

As though the same blood that was rescuing me was supercharging the very thing that had been stealing it.

It became a monster in my mind.

A vascular mass sitting inside my uterus, taking the blood my body had fought so hard to get back.

I would receive blood and feel myself surface.

Then the bleeding would return.

And once again, the breath would begin disappearing from my lungs.

The strength would drain from my body.

The pounding heart would return.

The darkness would creep back toward the edges of my vision.

It felt like being rescued from drowning only to have something grab your ankle beneath the surface and pull you straight back under.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That is why, in my memory of those months, the fibroid became the demon at the center of the story.

Every transfusion seemed to give me life—

and give it another opportunity to take that life away.

That first weekend, I received the first three units of what would eventually become eleven units of packed red blood cells before my hysterectomy.

Eleven bags of somebody else’s blood helping my body replace what it could no longer keep.

Eleven attempts to pull me back toward the surface.

But I did not know any of that on the first night.

I only knew that blood entered my vein—

and for the first time in what felt like forever,

I could finally take a full breath.

I thought I had escaped the drowning.

I had no idea something inside me was waiting to pull me back under.

This was never just a period.

A period does not bring you into an Emergency Department with a hemoglobin of 4.1, fighting for a breath your own blood can no longer adequately carry.

My body had crossed a threshold.

Soon, my entire life would follow.

And this was only the beginning.