When You Run Out of Mondays

A personal account of two pulmonary emboli, one word that never fully fit, and the curiosity that changed everything after.

For months, I felt off. Fatigued, flu-like, and winded climbing stairs. Groceries carried from the car felt heavier than they should have been. I dismissed it with a familiar promise: “Come Monday, I’ll eat better. I’ll move more.”

In the early morning hours of May 2016, my body stopped trying to grab my attention with subtlety. I woke from a sound sleep, my heart pounding like it was trying to escape my chest. I told myself it was anxiety. I’d lost both of my parents within three years of each other and grief has a way of living in the body long after the funeral.

I got out of bed, bargaining with my brain that we could walk it off. But each step made breathing harder, my heart pounding louder.

I slowly walked to my husband’s side of the bed and whispered: “We need to go to the ER. I think I’m having a heart attack.”

Don’t bargain with your body.
Listen to it.

May 2016 Thirty-Two Minutes

I arrived at the ER where chaos quickly became controlled, coordinated critical care. Lines and leads attached. IV bags hung. Blood drawn. Questions asked and scans ordered.

Thirty-two minutes later, the ER physician presented everything that had been gathered. “Ms. Conley, the good news is you are not having a heart attack. You do have a large blood clot in the main artery of your lung — a saddle pulmonary embolism. You’re going to spend a little time with us and we’re going to take good care of you.”

I was admitted to the ICU, where I met my vascular surgeon who explained the options — including a newer intervention called the EKOS Endovascular System. A minimally invasive procedure that ran a catheter from the jugular vein in my neck to my pulmonary artery, combining ultrasound energy with clot-busting drugs to break up the clot and relieve the load on my heart.

I was released from the hospital three days later to navigate a new chapter — surviving an almost fatal blood clot.

After EKOS™ catheter-directed therapy. May 2016.

Genetic testing doesn’t capture everything. You can have a family-specific clotting factor that standard panels miss. Clots and genetics are complicated — and there is still a great deal the science doesn’t know.

2016 — 2017 Curiosity Leads to Clues

A label that never fully fit.

For a year, I followed instructions: Warfarin monitoring, genetic testing, and a review of every standard risk factor. There was no recent travel, no surgery, and no estrogen. Despite having a family history, my bloodwork showed no inherited thrombophilia.

Eventually, my pulmonary embolism was labeled “unprovoked.” Medically, that was accurate. But the more I read, the more I understood that unprovoked describes what wasn’t present — not what was.

What was present: obesity, sedentary habits, chronic stress, and poor sleep. Not as a verdict. As a picture that took me time to see clearly. These are recognized contributors to cardiovascular and venous thromboembolism risk — not sudden triggers, but the kind of conditions that shape vascular health over years. It’s why lifestyle belongs in the post-clot conversation.

Those unaddressed conditions came with me. Four years later I was back in the same hospital — a second unprovoked pulmonary embolism.

November 2020 The Moment Everything Shifted

My lowest point. And the clue that changed everything.

A week in the ICU, then the cardiac unit. My lowest point, physically and mentally. I lay there racking my brain trying to figure out how I had gotten here again. I thought I had done all the things right.

Then I found the clue that changed everything.

Two months before my second PE, a peer-reviewed study had been published in an American Heart Association journal: Mitigation of Venous Thromboembolism Risk through Favorable Lifestyle — the ARIC Study. I hadn’t seen it in any of my follow-up appointments. Nobody had mentioned it. It’s one of the key studies behind why this platform exists.

It was like someone had opened a jigsaw puzzle and dumped it out in front of me. I couldn’t see the final picture yet. But I finally had pieces to work with.

That study didn’t answer everything. But it answered enough to keep asking.

Val Conley in the hospital — November 2020, second pulmonary embolism — November 2020 — the second event.

Hospital IV line during pulmonary embolism treatment — The reality of life on a heparin drip.

Val Conley walking hospital halls during recovery from pulmonary embolism — Learning to breathe — and trust my body again.

It wasn’t a study about recurrence. It was a study about risk — and it told me that lifestyle had a seat at the table that nobody had offered me.

I’m not certain my lifestyle caused my first clot. But I stopped being certain it didn’t. That uncertainty was the beginning of something.

I couldn’t stop asking: why wasn’t lifestyle part of the conversation after a clot?

That question became this platform.

Medicine is powerful.
It is not omniscient.

Val Conley — Blood Clot Survivor & Founder, Speaking of Blood Clots

2020 — Present Living Forward

Stopping the wait for Mondays.

Today, I’m in a long-term relationship with apixaban, and anticoagulation is part of my life. So is chronic venous insufficiency — a quiet reminder that clots leave lasting marks. But something changed after the second event: I stopped waiting for Mondays.

I began rebuilding habits — slowly, imperfectly, consistently. Movement became non-negotiable, sleep became protected, and nutrition became intentional rather than punitive. Over time, my relationship with my body shifted from reactive to proactive. From criticism to gratitude for what it has, and continues to, carry me through.

Val Conley today — VTE lifestyle educator and founder of Speaking of Blood Clots

Today — still asking questions, still building the conversation.

Health literacy became non-negotiable — not because I’m interested in replacing medicine, but because I’m determined to participate in it fully. If you want to explore the tools and resources that came out of that commitment, they’re here.

The Larger Picture

The warning signs were cumulative. Not sudden.

Venous thromboembolism is the third most common cardiovascular event after heart attack and stroke. When clots are discussed, the focus is often on length of anticoagulation. That matters. But so do the metabolic and lifestyle patterns that shape vascular health over decades.

I cannot prove lifestyle caused my clots, but I know the warning signs were cumulative, not sudden — and I don’t want other women discovering that only after they’ve run out of Mondays.

The research exists. The framework is here.

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Article:

When You Run Out of Mondays — A Pulmonary Embolism Survivor Story

Summary:

Val Conley survived two unprovoked pulmonary embolisms. This is the story of what happened, what the doctors said, and the conversation that came after.

Author:

Val Conley

Speaking of Blood Clots

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