Melanie Bloom Shares Her Story, and Tips for DVT Awareness Month

Melanie Bloom’s late husband David Bloom, a reporter for NBC News and an I-Fave, was covering the war in Iraq in 2003 when an extremely common, though often undiagnosed, condition called deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) claimed his life at the age of 39.

“A blood clot that formed in his leg broke loose, hit the lungs, and was instantly fatal,” said Melanie, who is now the national spokesperson for the Coalition to Prevent DVT.

Since March is DVT Awareness Month, Melanie shared with Imus some statistics, warning signs, and risk factors for DVT, a condition that is asymptomatic 50 percent of the time. When David died, Melanie thought the event that killed him was “a freak thing.” She was wrong.

“I found out more people die from this condition than from AIDS and breast cancer combined,” she said. Some 300,000 people lose their lives to DVT each year, and Melanie has been working to try to save some of those lives in David’s memory.

One of the major indicators of DVT is leg cramping, which David had complained about just two days before he died. The affected area is normally in the lower half of the leg, and can feel tender to the touch.

“When it hits the lungs, it can feel like shortness of breath,” Melanie said. “People describe it like they think they’re having a heart attack.”

DVT has been called “economy class syndrome,” because of the often cramped, restricted conditions in which most people are forced to fly commercially.

“Even though David was only 39 years old, he had been flying back and forth from New York to Kuwait in the build up to the war,” Melanie recalled. He was also sleeping every night in a cramped tank with his knees pulled up to his chin, dehydrated in the desert, in the middle of a war.

“I’ve called it the bomb that lied within his own body,” Melanie said carefully. “Because he didn’t know it was there, and he couldn’t protect himself from it.”

But thanks to her work, and the work of the Coalition to Prevent DVT, others will be able to protect themselves from the same fate. “Keeping blood moving is so, so important to the prevention of clots,” said Melanie, who recommends movement, stretching, and drinking water as the ways to ward off DVT.   

As the seventh anniversary of her husband’s death approaches on April 6, Melanie was happy to report to the I-Man that she had remarried a wonderful man with two children, and that she has “a wonderful, bustling, new life.” Of course, she and her three children miss David terribly; though time helps, it never fully heals.

“It feels good to know that if one life is saved from having heard his story, then his death won’t be in vein,” she said of David. “That’s my goal.”

-Julie Kanfer