THRAPSTON, UK, September 13, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– A teenage contestant in the “Face of Europe” beauty pageant has
fought her way back from a debilitating stroke that left her partially
blind and
Georgie Holland, 18, suffered the stroke after taking the contraceptive
pill Yasmin for two years, which doctors said they believed caused the
stroke, as it was her only risk factor.
Daily Mail about her frightening experience in an interview Tuesday.
The teen recalled how she became suddenly ill at school and decided to
walk home but didn’t make it there. After her father found her collapsed
in a bush at the side of the road, she spent two days in bed at home
before her parents decided to take her to the hospital.
“I felt really sick and it was really frustrating, because I knew what I
was thinking but I was unable to speak without slurring,” Georgie told
the Daily Mail. “When my parents and younger brother were shown my brain scan their faces just dropped, I was so worried what had they seen.”
“When I saw the scan I was shocked - there was a black clot in the
middle of my brain which had stopped the blood from flowing,” Georgie
said.
Georgie spent a week in the hospital recovering and suffered permanent
damage to her vision. She has to take medicine every day to prevent new
clots from forming.
While strokes are very unusual in young people, oral contraceptives are
well-known for causing dangerous blood clots that can lead to strokes
and other life-threatening complications.
According to the French National Agency for the Safety of Drugs and
Health Products (ANSM), contraceptive pills cause an average of 2,529
cases of venous thromboembolism (blood clots) per year.
The pill Holland took is particularly risky because it contains
drospirenone, a relatively new contraceptive drug that two different
studies in the British Medical Journal found to pose two to
three times a greater risk than other contraceptives containing the
older form of progestin called levonorgestrel.
ANSM statistics show that drospirenone-containing pills like Yasmin cause more than twice as many deaths as previous pills.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched an investigation
into the drug’s safety in 2011 after more than 7,000 women and girls
sued Bayer, which manufactures Yasmin and its sister drug Yaz, saying
the drug company misrepresented the dangers associated with using the
birth control pills. Its side effects include stroke, cardiac arrest,
blood clots, and gallbladder problems.
Bayer has marketed heavily its Yaz oral contraceptive products to
teenagers and young adult women, saying its products were not just for
preventing pregnancy, but also could treat PMS symptoms and acne.
One wrongful death lawsuit involved an 18-year-old New Jersey college
student who died of cardiac arrest after taking Yaz for acne treatment. A
blood clot had lodged in her lungs, resulting in her sudden death on
her way to classes.
Another British teen suffered seven heart attacks
and hundreds of clots last year after just one month of using a
different contraceptive, Microgynon (also manufactured by Bayer). “I was
admitted to the resuscitation ward at the hospital by which time I had
suffered seven near-fatal cardiac arrests,” said the victim, Alyce
Clark, who was 19 at the time. “I was bleeding through my nose and
mouth, and blood was escaping through my IV drips. My parents were
invited in to say goodbye and no one so much as mentioned a chance of
survival.”
A CT scan revealed hundreds of blood clots had formed in Alyce’s leg,
then traveled to her heart and lungs. Emergency injections of an
anti-coagulatory drug and two days in intensive care saved her life, but
she was told she would have to bring her promising career as a show
jumper to a premature end.
“They warned that my lungs would be damaged for the rest of my life,”
she said, “and I knew it would be foolish to pursue an athletic career.”
A young journalism student recently shared with The Huffington Post the story of how she gave up using contraceptive pills
after a life-threatening pulmonary she suffered at age 19 after just
four months of taking a drospirenone-containing birth control pill.
“Recovery was a seven-month process of ER trips, doctor visits three to
four times a week and a few blood-thinning medications consisting of
shots injected in my abdomen and a daily pill," wrote Jamie Hergenrader
in the Huffington Post. “I became severely anemic and had to go to the ER, where they considered giving me a blood transfusion.”
Jamie said that although her doctor had warned her about the potential
risks of taking contraception, she figured the chances of anything bad
happening were too remote to worry about.
"Why would I worry?” she wrote. “I had been perfectly healthy for 19
years. With the exception of one broken bone and a case of strep throat,
sickness and injury were not a part of my past."
"I had no reason to worry because I had no idea what kind of damage birth control could cause,” she said.
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