UAB Alumnus/Student/Employee Becomes Patient Following Brain Blood Clot

By Anna Waters

Die-hard University of Alabama football fan Michel Thomas would not have missed the 2016 SEC championship game – the Florida Gators against his Crimson Tide – for anything. Although he had spent the days before the game suffering from debilitating headaches and would spend the week after too nauseated to participate in final exams or project meetings with his classmates, Thomas made it to the Georgia Dome on Dec. 3, 2016, with his co-worker of 14 years, Tracy Taylor, R.N., nurse to UAB neurosurgeon Mark Harrigan, M.D.

Unknown to both of them, Thomas attended that game with a blood clot in his brain, and Harrigan would later be the one to remove it.

“I will say I was pretty miserable during the game,” said Thomas, a business officer in the UAB Department of Neurosurgery. “I remember cheering during the first quarter during a turnover and thinking my head was going to explode.” After nearly a week of constant headaches and nausea, Thomas – a UAB alumnus and a graduate student in health informatics in the UAB School of Public Health – finally sought treatment at UAB Medicine Urgent Care for what he thought were common migraines.

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