Serena Williams is opening up about how she was forced to advocate for herself to save her life after giving birth.
The tennis icon has been vocal in the past about the complications she faced when giving birth to her daughter, Olympia, in September 2017. After receiving an emergency c-section, she nearly lost her life after developing a blood clot in one of her arteries and a hematoma in her abdomen. Williams says her concerns were ignored repeatedly in an all too familiar tale recounted by millions of Black mothers. One nurse even told the sports legend that the medication she was on was making her “talk crazy” once she raised concerns about her health.
Williams detailed her health scare in a new collection of essays, “Arrival Stories: Women Share Their Experiences of Becoming Mothers.” She revealed that even after learning of the blood clots in her lungs, she was not given adequate health care.
“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,” the 40-year-old wrote in her essay. In addition to requesting blood thinners, Williams also pushed the nurses to perform a Cat scan on her lungs, which unveiled potentially deadly blood clots.
Serena Williams story is not uncommon. Black women in the United States are three times more likely to die in or after childbirth than white women. In December, Vice President Kamala Harris called the “systemic inequities” that impact Black expectant mothers a “matter of life and death.”
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