Last night I got my first nose bleed. It took several minutes, but eventually the bleeding stopped. This morning it happened again, but this time it was much worse. The blood gushed from my left nostril and wouldn't stop for over thirty minutes. When Jeniffer Krzyczkowski, my home nurse showed up, she immediately suggested I head to LGH emergency to get it checked out.

My INR range should be between 2.5 and 3.5, but the tests at the hospital came back with 6.0. Yesterday at LifeLabs it was 7.4, so it was slowly dropping, but obviously not fast enough. The calm LGH emergency doctor recommended two options: 1) I ease up on the Warfarin for a couple of days to get my INR under control, or 2) he could give me a Vitamin K shot to counter the high INR at a cost of something like $10,000. I may be important, but not $10,000 worth of 1 shot important, and therefore I opted to simply manage my Warfarin (a generic form of Coumadin) better.

As scary as the nose bleeds were, they were a valuable lesson into anticoagulants, Warfarin, INR, and how I needed to manage it all. Two days later, the INR dropped to 2.9 at LifeLabs, but the lesson was learned — I needed to be more responsible and aware of the foods I was eating while managing my daily Warfarin intake.