An orgasm could have killed here: after experiencing the heights of pleasure, a seemingly healthy 35-year-old woman plunged into a terrifying medical ordeal.(Real-Life Reads: THE COSMO POST)

Just minutes after having sex with her boyfriend, Sara (not her real name), a 35-year-old woman from a western suburb of Chicago, suddenly felt her left arm go weak. Panicked, she was taken to a local community hospital and then transferred to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois, for more intensive evaluation.

When she arrived there, she had slurred speech, facial droop, a paralyzed left arm, and weakness in her left leg. "She had suffered a very disabling stroke and was rapidly losing feeling in her left side. We knew we had to act fast," says Jose Biller, MD, professor and chair of the department of neurology at Loyola University in Chicago. Billet and his team quickly began to put together the pieces of this mystifying puzzle. Sara was on the Pill, which they believe caused a blood clot in her leg. The physical responses of sex--an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and abdominal pressure--may have helped the clot to break loose from Sara's thigh and migrate to her heart. In many cases, a small clot of this nature would be relatively harmless--it would travel out of the heart and into her lung, where it would dissolve. "But it turns out, she had another undiagnosed condition: a patent foramen ovale (PFO), which is a small hole in her heart," says Dr. Biller. The clot passed through the PFO and then traveled into her brain, where it lodged itself in a main blood vessel, blocking blood flow to the area of the brain that controls the left side of the body.

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Ordinarily, the doctors would have injected Sara with a clot-busting drug, which is typically (and effectively) used to restore blood flow. But at more than six hours after the onset of her symptoms, it was too late, and they had to come up with another way to get the medicine to her brain. The team of doctors had an idea: They could administer the drug by inserting a thin tube into an artery in her groin and pushing it up to the spot in her brain where the clot ...