MAGNETIC ATTRACTION

Up until age 26, Danielle Pilarninos thought her health was basically “fine.” And then one morning after a pain-filled night, she woke up to a left bicep that was vastly swollen and painful.

Thinking she had a blood clot in her arm, she went to work at the hospital where she served as a sonographer performing ultrasounds for high-risk pregnancies. A doctor immediately sent her to the emergency room.

“They did a scan and there was no blood clot, everything was fine,” she says. “But my blood work showed high levels of CPK [creatine phosphokinase], an enzyme that occurs in the blood when you have a lot of muscle die off, and mine was really elevated.”

Diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, which, she says, “is just a fancy word for saying your muscles are dying,”she was also diagnosed with compartment syndrome from the edema—a painful condition that occurs when pressure within muscle tissue builds, decreasing blood flow and preventing nutrients and oxygen from reaching nerve and muscle cells. 

Danielle was hospitalized for five days to keep her body hydrated and prevent her kidneys from failing due to all the toxins in her bloodstream from the muscle cell die-off, and then finally told the presumed cause: she’d been exercising too hard.

“At the time I was running between 20 and 30 miles a week, lifting weights on a regular basis and doing yoga. I was really fit. And because I knew my body,