- Cloe suffered months of relentless vomiting, heartburn and pain before doctors made a terrifying discovery. Her contraceptive implant had vanished from her arm
- After countless hospital visits and scans failed to locate the implant, specialist imaging finally revealed the implant had pierced her heart, requiring life-saving open-heart surgery
- Now, Cloe’s sharing her story to raise awareness of the rare complication and encourage anyone who can no longer feel their implant to seek medical advice
Here Cloe Westerway, 22, from Clyde, Vic, tells her story in her own words.
Sitting down with my GP, my mum Bec, then 38, and I hoped to find the right contraceptive for me.
I’d been on the contraceptive pill, but I often forgot to take it. So when I was 20, my doctor suggested a change.
‘I recommend the Implanon,’ they said.
Effective for three years, it was a 4cm-long plastic rod inserted in the upper arm. It’d release hormones that stop ovulation.
It sounded good to me and Mum, so I had the device inserted at a local women’s clinic a few days later.
When the bruising went down a week later, I felt around the inside of my left arm for the implant.
Weird! I thought, feeling it under my skin.
Familiar with the possible side effects, I wasn’t alarmed when my period lasted for two months, then didn’t come back for up to two months.
As time passed though, I began to feel a strange sensation in the same arm I’d had the implant inserted.
‘It feels like something is pinching me, then a burning feeling shoots down my arm,’ I told Mum.
‘Maybe your body is taking some time to adjust to the hormones,’ she reasoned.
I hoped the symptoms would settle with time.
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Waking in the middle of the night nine months later, I felt like my heart was beating out of my chest, and sickness was stirring in my belly.
Running to the bathroom, I vomited for nine hours straight.
When it finally stopped, the heartburn that followed was relentless.
Falling asleep each night, I was woken by the same awful nausea and spent the early hours of the morning on the bathroom floor.
‘There’s something really wrong with me,’ I sobbed to mum at 3am one night.
She drove me to Emergency, and I was given an anti-nausea injection.
It didn’t work though.
Kept in for monitoring overnight, docs couldn’t work out what was wrong and discharged me.
Over the next nine months, I became a regular at Emergency, but nothing they did worked.
Desperate, I begged my GP for help.
‘Maybe the implant hormones aren’t agreeing with you. Let’s take it out,’ she suggested.
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Sitting up on the table, I stretched out my arm while she searched for it.
‘There’s no implant in there that I can feel,’ she finally said, explaining it must have ‘migrated’ to somewhere else in my body.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, terrified.
She sent me for an arm X-ray, a CT scan and an ultrasound, but they still couldn’t find the implant.
‘I don’t know how to help you,’ my GP said, worried.
Further testing at the women’s clinic also drew a blank.
‘It’s possible it was never inserted,’ they suggested. I knew it had been, and the thought they didn’t believe me made me feel like I was crazy.
Finally, they tested my blood for the hormone etonogestrel, that’s produced by the implant.
It was positive!
‘Maybe it was inserted into the other arm,’ they suggested, but still couldn’t find it.
And I knew they wouldn’t.
I was certain which arm it was in!
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By now, I was taking time away from work in retail and from my engineering studies due to my symptoms.
Referred to Monash Hospital in May last year, I was given a fluoroscopy X-ray, which is like a video X-ray.
Nothing could have prepared me for what the doctor said as she turned the screen towards me.
There, on the display, was my beating heart – and the implant.
‘Your implant has pierced your heart,’ she said gently.
If I hadn’t seen a doctor when I did, I could have died.
I was told that while there were cases overseas of implants migrating to a patient’s lung, they hadn’t heard of one reaching the heart.
‘How had this happened?’ I asked.
‘It must have been inserted directly into a vein, or very close to it, and somehow travelled into the pulmonary artery, then your right ventricle and into the heart’s left chamber,’ she said.
It was inside my heart…
Feeling the floor beneath me slip away, I was terrified.
‘What if they don’t get it out? What if I don’t survive? Or what if more damage happens?’ I spiralled.
The only option to remove it was heart surgery.
It was scheduled for one month’s time, the next available slot, and in the meantime, I had to rest and wait nervously.
‘Be brave. We love you,’ Mum smiled, putting on a brave face as I was wheeled away into theatre on the day of the op.
Waking from the four hour surgery, Mum was by my bedside.
‘They got it out, you’re going to be okay!’ she smiled, squeezing my hand.
The doctors explained the op had gone well, but I’d had a seizure in theatre.
Then, as I lay in recovery, my body began convulsing again.
I learned seizures were a possible side effect from the heart bypass machine and the drugs, and often occur in people with an abnormality in their temporal lobe or an existing epileptic condition.
Anti-seizure medication brought them under control, and tests showed I had a small cyst on my frontal lobe.
My little brother, Chase, seven, has epilepsy, and doctors believe the surgery could have triggered it in me, or it could it be because of the cyst.
I’m due to see a neurosurgeon, but for now I’m recovering from heart surgery and pleased to say the sickness has finally stopped.
And I’m speaking out to spread the word about implants.
My contraception could have killed me, but I’m just glad I lived to tell the tale!
A spokesman for Organon Pro said patients unable to feel their Implanon in their arm were urged to see a GP, and that safety was their first concern.
