*Serena Williams opens up in a personal essay for Elle about her near-death experience while giving birth to her daughter Olympia in September 2017.
“I was nervous about meeting my baby,” Williams said in the Elle essay, titled: “How Serena Williams Saved Her Own Life”. “Throughout my pregnancy, I’d never felt a connection with her. While I loved being pregnant, I didn’t have that amazing ‘Oh my God, this is my baby’ moment, ever. It’s something people don’t usually talk about, because we’re supposed to be in love from the first second.”
Williams had an emergency C-section when health complications started to arise.
“When I finally saw her—and I just knew it was going to be a girl, that was one thing I knew about her before we even had it confirmed—I loved her right away,” she shared with Elle. “It wasn’t exactly instantaneous, but it was there, and from that seed, it grew. I couldn’t stop staring at her, my Olympia.”
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After surgery, Williams said she felt paralyzed and knew something was wrong with her body. She kept pressing the medical staff to take seriously her concerns but her complaints were initially brushed off. Williams has had health complications since 2010, when doctors discovered blood clots in her lungs. She has been at high-risk for them ever since.
“No one was really listening to what I was saying. The logic for not starting the blood thinners was that it could cause my C-section wound to bleed, which is true. Still, I felt it was important and kept pressing,” Williams recalled in the essay, adding that “all the while, I was in excruciating pain”.
She later began coughing so hard that her C-section stitches started to burst.
“I spoke to the nurse,” the tennis star said. “I told her: ‘I need to have a CAT scan of my lungs bilaterally, and then I need to be on my heparin drip.’ Williams recalls the nurse saying, ‘I think all this medicine is making you talk crazy.’ I said, ‘No, I’m telling you what I need: I need the scan immediately. And I need it to be done with dye.'”
The nurse ultimately called the doctor and they found that Williams had a blood clot in her lungs. She had a total of four surgeries before she was able to leave the hospital a week after giving birth.
Williams notes in her essay that in the US, Black women are “nearly three times more likely to die during or after childbirth than their white counterparts.”
“Being heard and appropriately treated was the difference between life or death for me; I know those statistics would be different if the medical establishment listened to every Black woman’s experience,” she wrote.
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