‘I will never see again’: How just two weeks on birth control left a young woman blind

Chelsea Painter Davis became blind when she was only 19 years old, but it wasn’t the result of an accident. Rather, it happened after she was prescribed birth control pills.

“I started taking birth control pills because that’s what all the little good Protestant girls do, or so I thought, when you’re about to get married,” Davis tells Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable.”

“I wanted to have a real conversation with my primary care physician. When I came in, I was like, ‘I want to choose something that’s safe, something that’s effective, and something that’s ethical, and she was not interested in having that conversation with me,” Davis explains, noting that she got the impression her doctor just wanted her to “take the prescription and leave.”

Davis felt so uncomfortable, that despite her unanswered questions, she decided to just get the prescription and leave.

“I just started taking the medication, and I did not really feel OK with that, but I was a virgin at the time, I wasn’t having sex, I was like, ‘OK, well, it’s not that big of a deal, it’s not like I’m causing any problems with the baby right now, it’s not even possible for me to be pregnant right now,’” she tells Stuckey.

After taking the medication for only two weeks, Davis ended up in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism.

“I almost died,” she says, adding that her friend had also died from a blood clot that was due to taking hormonal birth control.

“But for some reason, you still think, ‘Oh, that’s a fluke, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with birth control,’ that just means, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong in her body, that would never happen to me,’” she says.

After suffering the pulmonary embolism, Davis began getting headaches.

“I recovered from my pulmonary embolism. They realized that I had blood clotting disorders, and combined with the birth control, that’s what threw the clot. But I started getting headaches after, and I went to see that same PCP, and I said, ‘Hey, my head hurts really bad, I’m trying to take my college classes, I just had my wedding, and Tylenol won’t cut it,’” she explains.

While Davis had stopped taking the birth control at that point, her primary care physician told her to “calm down” and that she was “just really stressed out.”

The headaches continued, and finally she was forced to realize that her vision was also failing.

“It wasn’t until my mom came to visit for Thanksgiving, and we were setting up the Christmas tree,” Davis says. “She asked me to hand her the purple Christmas ornament, and I was holding two of them, and I couldn’t tell which one it was.”

“I ended up having a pseudotumor cerebri, which is a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid that squished my optic nerves to death. And because I was so delayed in coming to get a proper diagnosis, there was nothing they could do,” she explains, adding, “I will never see again. There’s nothing they can do for me.”

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