Health security

What aren't women who take the new contraceptive pill being told about the higher risk of blood clots?

The first sign something was wrong was a sudden feeling of pins and needles in her left arm. As Carina Trickey, now 33, recalls: ‘It felt as if I’d slept on my arm and made it go numb.’

Then when the slimming club consultant picked up the phone to call a customer, ‘my words came out as gobbledygook — all in the wrong order’.

She adds: ‘I tried to speak again, but was still talking nonsense so I put the phone down. By this stage although I was still sitting down I was feeling dizzy and light-headed, as if I was going to pass out. Then my left arm slipped off the table — I had no control over moving it. I suddenly felt very scared.’

A colleague drove her to A&E where her blood pressure was found to be sky-high. Carina had suffered a transient ischaemic attack or mini-stroke — where one of the blood vessels supplying the brain becomes blocked temporarily by a blood clot. Fortunately, within an hour her symptoms had gone.