The year 2017 was quite a remarkable year for Serena Williams. In January, she won her record 23rd Grand Slam at the Australian Open, while pregnant. In September, she gave birth to daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. In November, she got married to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. In December, she was back on the tennis court, playing Jelena Ostapenko in an exhibition match in Abu Dhabi.
The 36-year-old was also all set to return to tennis again to defend her trophy in Melbourne. However, she delayed her comeback saying she wanted to be her 100% in order to play there.
Her coach Patrick Mouratoglou has said that she had faced some medical complications after she gave birth, which delayed the moment that she could come back to practice.
Now, Serena revealed that she had a medical scare right after the birth of her daughter. In the cover story for Vogue’s February issue, in which she features with her three-month daughter, she spoke about how she developed developing several small blood clots in her lungs after giving birth in September.
In the cover story, she has spoken about motherhood, marriage, her impending return to tennis and how her friends on the tour connected with her. But what stood out the most was the part where she finally detailed the health crisis after becoming a mother.
According to the article, the tennis superstar “spent the first six weeks of motherhood unable to get out of bed” because of her pulmonary embolisms – a life-threatening condition which kept her away from tennis for almost a year back in 2010-11. That she returned and had a record-breaking run after that was nothing short of remarkable.
The tennis star described her ordeal after having an emergency C-section after her daughter’s heart rate went dangerously low during contractions. The surgery went was fine but soon after “everything went bad,” said Serena.
The next day, while recovering in the hospital, Serena suddenly felt short of breath. Because of her history of blood clots, and because she was off her daily anticoagulant regimen due to the recent surgery, she immediately assumed she was having another pulmonary embolism. (Serena lives in fear of blood clots.) She walked out of the hospital room so her mother wouldn’t worry and told the nearest nurse, between gasps, that she needed a CT scan with contrast and IV heparin (a blood thinner) right away. The nurse thought her pain medicine might be making her confused. But Serena insisted, and soon enough a doctor was performing an ultrasound of her legs. “I was like, a Doppler? I told you, I need a CT scan and a heparin drip,” she remembers telling the team. The ultrasound revealed nothing, so they sent her for the CT, and sure enough, several small blood clots had settled in her lungs. Minutes later she was on the drip. “I was like, listen to Dr. Williams!”
It didn’t end there. Serena’s C-section wound opened up from the intense coughing spells and she needed another surgery to insert a filter into a major vein to prevent more clots. They also found that a large hematoma in her abdomen as a “result of a medical catch-22 in which the potentially lifesaving blood thinner caused hemorrhaging at the site of her C-section.”
While both mother and daughter were well in the end, Serena says that nothing has tested her as much as her first few weeks as a mother.
To think that she recovered from that to start practising again and is planning a comeback by Indian Wells, says a lot about the strength and tenacity of Serena Williams.
Read the full Vogue article here