Just two more tidbits (which help explain how many times I jump into medical discussions here, even though my educational background is in math, science, law, and now art).
Part of the reason for the month in the hospital (and the 100+ sticks) was because the doctors were being stupid.
They (residents and/or interns - I don't recall by now which) were having a tough time getting the heparin right. I was extremely hypocoagulated. They turned off the heparin, calculated the half-life of heparin in my system, then turned it back on at the time they deemed appropriate, waited an hour, and then drew another PT/INR. Same result. Wash, rinse repeat. After the second time I suggested that I was never dropping into the safe range, regardless of the theoretical half-life. They rejected it as nonsensical and hooked me back up again at the time they decided was (theoretically) appropriate. The third time they tried to hook me back up, I refused treatment until they agreed to run a PT/INR before they turned it back on. I'm sure you know what's coming . . . I had never dropped into the safe range. I don't recall how many hours later it was before it was safe to hook up the heparin again, but it was more than double the time they had been waiting. (Their excuse - they didn't want to have to poke me extra times - something they never asked me about, nor had I EVER complained about. I'm a very easy stick; I inherited my father's gigantic hand veins. Sure it was a pain, but I understood the reasoning both for the number of sticks, and where they had to draw from. Better safe and experience a bunch of ouchies than dead.)
I got yelled at by my primary care physician for being mean to the baby docs. But at least I wasn't dead from hemorrhaging.
Sometime after that incident, the actual doctors (including a specialist who was called in from a second hospital in town) arrived in my room with 6, if I recall correctly, case studies of venous thoracic outlet syndrome. (This was back in the early 80s - before upper body muscle building was a thing, accompanied by an increase in VTOS.) That was all they could find. They invited me to read them, share any ideas I had with them. They explained that although the blood would eventually create some collateral circulation in its inevitable return to my heart, it wouldn't be complete and I would almost certainly always have circulation issues in my left arm - and that it would be worse when I was exercising or pregnant. Shortly after that I proposed starting an exercise program that took advantage of the opportunity we had while my arm resembled an eggplant to push the collateral circulation to its limits. I couldn't create an instantaneous pregnancy - but I could exercise enough that I could create collateral veins large enough to handle the circulation during exercise. I got permission to trot around the floor pushing my heparin pole for the duration of my hospital stay (a half mile, twice a day - fast enough to get winded - and then started swimming a mile or two several times a week). To this day, I am one of the few people who had VTOS before the body building craze who has zero remnant circulation issues. (Now they know something - and just take the rib out - as they did with the contra side for me 20 years later.)
So all my medical certainty which doesn't really match my training started with those two doctors inviting me into their exclusive arena. (There's been lots more in our family's lives since then - but that's where it started.)
And, I guess, a third tidbit . . . don't spend a month in the hospital when you are too sick to really be hospitalized, but for the fact that they hadn't invented outpatient subq heparin yet. You see way too much about how hospitals really function.
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