The Main Reasons I Quit Taking Warfarin

3 min readJan 2, 2022

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I was diagnosed with Protein C Deficiency all the way back in the spring of 2012. Saying that makes me feel really old by the way but I digress. Which as a quick summary, my body hates to bleed so my blood is naturally more viscous, meaning I clot a lot better than the average person. This sounds cool at first, almost as if I have a boring version of fast healing like Naruto, but in reality, it’s dangerous because I’m more susceptible to blood clots which could cause a stroke or heart attack depending on how bad my luck is. Now that that’s out of the way. Here I am almost 10 years later, and I’ve come to terms living with this health condition. Originally, I was prescribed warfarin (or Coumadin, depending on who you ask) but I ended up switching over to a newer drug at the time called Xarelto, here are the main reasons why.

Time

I spent a lot of time going to and from the clinic laboratory in order to get blood drawn. When I first started doing that it really wasn’t a major issue, but once I went off to college almost 2 hours away, it became impossible to really manage. Before I could get “discharged” from the local anticoagulation center my primary doctor switched me over to Xarelto, allowing me to live a more normal life, without a bunch of laboratory check ins but with the added risk that if I were to start bleeding out, it may be incredibly hard to stop. As much of a shitty trade-off as that sounds, I was ok with it, it ultimately meant that I could spend more time enjoying my life rather than going to get pricked by a needle every week, which brings us to my second point.

Needles

I think I’m self-aware enough that I can admit that I think I psyched myself out over the last couple of years in regard to needles, because now they scare me even more then when I was a teenager. But back then when I would get blood drawn, I had to deal with getting stabbed by a needle almost every week and that was very far from a pleasant experience. As a matter of fact it was miserable, but of course than was then, if I had to go back to getting blood drawn all the time now, I’m pretty sure I would just have a mental breakdown.