Serena Williams has revealed harrowing details of how she nearly died when giving birth to daughter Alexis Olympia in 2017. Williams, 40, announced she was pregnant in April that year, after revealing she had been eight weeks gone whilst winning the Australian Open.
Five months later, she had an emergency cesarean-section delivery due to the baby’s heart rate dropping during labour and also suffered a pulmonary embolism after giving birth, leaving her bedridden for over a month and delaying he return to training. She would return in late 2017 at the Mubadala World Tennis Championship in Abu Dhabi, although didn’t play another Grand Slam event until the French Open in 2018.
The success at Melbourne Park represented her 23rd major win, just one short of Margaret Court’s all-time record. Since coming back the American has reached two Wimbledon and two US Open finals but is still seeking the Slam win she needs to equal the Australian.
But now the iconic player has revealed how she’s lucky to have even been able to get back to tennis at all, after doctors intially ignored her pleas for action following the birth. Having learnt in 2010 she had blood clots in her lungs, the star realised in the hospital that something was seriously wrong.
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“I asked a nurse, ‘When do I start my heparin drip? Shouldn’t I be on that now?'” she wrote in elle.com. “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. The logic for not starting the blood thinners was that it could cause my C-section wound to bleed, which is true. Still, I felt it was important and kept pressing. All the while, I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t move at all—not my legs, not my back, nothing.
“I began to cough. The nurses warned me that coughing might burst my stitches, but I couldn’t help it. The coughs became racking, full-body ordeals. Every time I coughed, sharp pains shot through my wound. I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing because I just couldn’t get enough air. I grabbed a towel, rolled it up, and put it over my incision. Sure enough, I was hacking so hard that my stitches burst. I went into my first surgery after the C-section to get restitched.”
It later emerged Williams was coughing because she had an embolism. The doctors would also discover a hematoma, then even more clots that had to be kept from travelling to Williams’ lungs.
“I spoke to the nurse. I told her: ‘I need to have a CAT scan of my lungs bilaterally, and then I need to be on my heparin drip.'” she added. Following further arguments, the nurse consulted a doctor and after a CAT scan, Williams was diagnosed with a blood clot and had a filter inserted into her veins to break it up.
One week and four surgeries later, Williams left hospital, admitting “I couldn’t walk down the driveway,” when she first arrived home.
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