Blood Thinners and Bruising from Shouldering a Rifle ?

[MARINE DIVISION TWO]

How is this for a bruise? It did get bigger and went down to my wrist. My son Sean who is an ER Doc told me to be careful about blood in my joints.

I sited in my son Mike's 870 slug gun for him. He did get this buck 3 days later in DE so it was worth it. I was on Effient and a Baby aspirin at the time. I am only on a baby aspirin now.

Thank you for sharing these personal pics ! My bruising is not that bad,and dont want to expireience the resulting bruising.Looks like its Bow Hunting for me only from now on until doctor takes me off the blood thinners,another ten months to go !

[Twoboxer]

I'm no doctor. The OP prompted me to read this: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/...some/index.htm

My read says that Effient is judged to be better suited for certain uses than Plavix, but does contain a black box warning about increased risk of hemorrhage. "Black Box" is the strongest labeling warning the FDA uses, so it's serious.

With regard to FDA agreeing to Effient's superiority claim, if Consumer Report has it right it is " For every 1,000 patients treated, it prevented 24 more heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths than clopidogrel did, while it caused only 10 more cases of serious or fatal bleeding."

If one assumes that the "24 incidents" and the "10 incidents" are all equivalent in their impact on human life, then the net change is 14 incidents per 1,000 patient uses. A 1.4% difference. But I wouldn't be at all surprised to find it framed as a 41.6% decrease in negative outcomes to support a marketing claim.

That analysis may be garbage on my part, but it would be quite enough to be asking my interventional cardiologist a bunch of questions.

Even if (s)he isn't a firearms enthusiast.

JMO.

ETA: My own Plavix dose is 75mg/day as a lifetime maintenance dose, so it finally occurred to me that dosage matters. This may explain in part why I don't bruise at all when artillery shooting.

The studies are based on 300mg doses, normally in preparation for a procedure. In my case, my angina emergency instructions are to take (a few) nitro . . . if no help chew a whole aspirin and take 300mg of Plavix. And from what I read, I'd rather be on Plavix at that point than Effient because the next step might be bypass surgery, and I would rather not be on Effient.

Based on what I've read, I'll be asking my cardio whether that emergency dose should be 450mg or 600mg now, so thanks for bringing this up.

Again, JMO, but might be worthy of asking your cardio.

[Ronin]

Marine 2,
This is not a problem to be taken lightly or tongue in cheek, so I wont joke. The blood thinners are doing what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately, this means you will bruise/bleed more easily. YOU ARE NOT A WIMP. There are things you must consider before undertaking simple tasks that you are used to doing. You WILL bleed / bruise much more easily including your shoulder and more importantly YOUR BRAIN, simple falls that jostle your noggin can cause detrimental bleeds in your brain (stroke). Please be careful. I'm not close, but if you want to borrow my Savage .22 for an extended period of time you are more than welcome. Small targets (Necco wafers at 25 yards) are hard and a lot of fun... If you have specific Med questions please P.M. me

Cb R.Ph. registered pharmacist

You make a very good point about potential brain bleeding while taking blood thinners. A very close family friend suffered a major brain bleed a few weeks ago. He takes blood thinners for a heart condition and his doctors think that when he bumped his head a few weeks back, it caused his brain to hemorrhage. So far he's beaten the odds. They were able to save him and he is on his way to recovery; albeit a very long and slow one. Most people who suffer that sort of bleed do not survive.

I've been taking Xarelto for the past nine months for a blood clot behind my left knee. My Dr discovered it during an ultrasound a couple of weeks after I had leg surgery. So far, I haven't experienced any bleeding or bruising, but I am especially mindful of the potential.