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I gotta ("gotta" in my dictionary, folks) share this with you. I woke up this morning with a pain in my knee (to the side of the knee cap) which only hurts when I cough. I find that very bizarre. It doesn't seem to be anything serious. It might have been that my knee spent the night resting on a wire that sticks up through my mattress (there are a lot of those, it turns out). But why would it only hurt when I cough? For a while it hurt when I walked, and it is still quite painful when I cough. So I am now taking cough drops for the pain in my knee.
Addendum #1:
The pain spread to most of the length of my right leg, and became almost unbearable. So, I went to a doctor. The pain turned out to be a blood clot in the outer veins of my leg. Such a clot should remain in those veins, and should not be life threatening. I was given aspirin to thin my blood, to help disolve the clot and prevent further clots.
However, some of the clot was apparently in deeper veins, because the clot swirled through my heart and lodged in my right lung, causing me great pain, and sending me to the hospital for a week and a half (See My Stay at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital). I am out of the hospital now, and am feeling better. I am on a stronger blood thinner, warfarin sodium (brand name Coumadin). And I am taking it easy, as the doctor does not want me to breath heavily.
Incidentally, such a clot does not normally go to the brain and cause a stroke. Apparently a clot in the arteries can go to the brain. A clot in the veins often lodges in the lung. Either of these clots can rarely lodge in the heart. And any of these clots can be life threatening. Essentially, I was all right because my heart is strong, and I did not suffer any lung infection. The doctors were mainly concerned with preventing infection. I did have plenty of fluid in both lungs.
Addendum #2:
The day that I first had my clot, I was wearing a pair of socks that were very tight at the top, right where my clot occurred. It is easy to blame the socks; or was that a coincidence? I was surprised to find out that socks causing (or contributing to) clots is a fairly common phenomenon. I threw away my four pairs of that kind of socks.