I overheard the intake person talking with someone: "I'm worried about that guy in #68." Why? "He thinks he's got a spider bite, but he's got blood clot written all over him."
I felt pretty good about that; it meant I'd have a place to sleep for a whole night. Then I was suddenly surrounded by 5 or 6 people.
Symptoms, sir?
Sometimes slurred speech, tingling in the extremities, can't spell anymore, confused by the way people talk so _fast_, confused by simple things, excessively paranoid, feels like there's an Ace bandage wrapped around my chest.
You're a junkie. No. You're exclusively vegetarian. No. You're diabetic. No, I've been tested for that. Well, we'll take a blood draw.
I got an ultrasound over my legs -- and they discovered a DVT. Next thing I knew, they'd slapped me in hospital for eight days. I was put on no less than eight medications, the scariest of which was Coumadin (same as Warfarin, I think?) -- scary because they made me watch a video describing it, by which I mean "You follow these instructions to the letter or you gonna die, son." At least that's what it felt like. And I had to sign all kinds of waivers, or something. Two of the residents (very young women) told me that they had had DVT's themselves... possibly as a result of being exclusively vegetarian?
The diagnosis was: Pernicious Anemia. My understanding (which is not to be trusted) is that the myelin sheathing around my nerves has been dissolving for years. Apparently the communicating tissue between the axons in my brain had been going away for quite some time.
I liked this diagnosis because: it's easily treatable; it explains my increasingly weird behavior; I'm not dead from it.
The treatment is: Take B12 every day for the rest of my life.
The highly-abbreviated coda to the story is: My Doctor told I'd had this disease for at least ten years(!); hospital got me a case manager, who got me Disability, Homed, and a Laptop. But it took 2 years or so.
TLDR: Being exclusively vegetarian can cause DVT's