Vicky Opitz didn't overthink the fact that she was feeling tired as the months of winter and spring training began to ramp up in preparation for the coming summer racing season.
"We always feel kind of tired as athletes at the end of hard practices," she said. " So, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was the start of the summer season, and it was hot."
But as a veteran of the US women's training center in Princeton in the middle of selection for the 2017 World Rowing Championships, having a hard erg piece go very wrong, or "blow up," got her attention.
"I had never felt so terrible after an erg piece as I did. I had chest pain. I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt dizzy." But as the symptoms subsided, Opitz did what a lot of athletes in that situation do, she chalked it up to a possible bug and let it go, especially as she started to feel better.
It would be a few more weeks before the warning signs came back, but by that time Opitz was in an a more serious state - one that ended her season and landed her in a Polish hospital during a World Cup competition that was kicking off of a long European trip that included the Royal Henley Regatta and then World Cup III in Lucerne, Switzerland.
"I was doubling up in a four and the eight and we did a couple of races and my left arm got pretty big," she said. By big, she meant several centimeters difference from one arm to the other in the span of a few hours.
The US team medical staff, led by head physical therapist Marc Nowak, knew just from looking at Opitz that she had a bigger problem than just overexertion and sent her straight to the hospital, and then arranged to have her flown back to the states.
"I went to see Marc after the eight race and he said you need to go to the hospital right now, there is something very wrong. From the get go, I have to give a shout out to (Nowak)," Opitz said. "He cared so much, and I was really scared and he said you're going to be OK. He was awesome."
"I ended up going to the Polish hospital, which was quite an experience, and they ran some tests and did an ultrasound." She said she was told the tests were inconclusive, and "they basically told me I overexerted myself."
"When I got back to Marc he told me, 'that's not possible, I know what this is. I've seen it before. It's a blood clot and you need to go back home.' And that really hurt because I was supposed to go from that race to (the Royal Henley Regatta) and then Lucerne."
Nowak was correct, and the doctors back home in Princeton confirmed his initial diagnosis. Opitz had a blood clot in her arm and had very likely experienced a pulmonary embolism during the last erg test.
"You always hear of people having a reason for blowing up on an erg test," she said. "Turns out I did."
Opitz, tests showed, had not one but two blood clots, a small one in her right bicep and a four-inch clot in her subclavian vein - an axillary vein that channels blood through the first rib to the muscles in the neck.
"It was pretty gnarly," Opitz said.
Before the entire episode was over, Opitz was ultimately diagnosed with Thoracic outlet syndrome and landed in surgery in Philadelphia, where a portion of her first rib was removed.
Opitz's story does have a happy ending - but not one that came easy or without a lot of pain and PT. By late summer that season, she was back in training. Opitz was able to participate in the team late summer erg test and row in the 2017 Head of the Charles Regatta.
Today she is finishing up the last few days of preparation to race at the 2018 World Rowing Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria in both the pair and the eight. Opitz is halfway to her goal of being selected to row in the 2020 Olympics.
And she has a message to any athlete that is thinking something is just not right with their health.
"Get it checked out," she said. "For a little while, even before that erg test, I just felt like something was off. I remember telling teammates I felt tired, I felt weird. So, it's important as an athlete that if you think something is kind of wrong, if in your gut, you know something doesn't feel normal, get it checked out, it doesn't hurt."
"There is no shame in taking care of yourself," she said. "It's a hard lesson to learn, but I think it's always better to be safe than sorry."
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