Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Columbia's president resigns, Instagram failed to take down hateful comments against female U.S. politicians, and a VC's near-death experience reinforced her passion for women's health.
- Life or death. Deena Shakir was eight days postpartum with her third child last September when she got a bad headache. It didn't feel normal. "It felt like a helmet was squeezing my brain," she remembers.
Just over a week after a C-section, Shakir still didn't think her headache was an emergency. "Everything feels weird" after a C-section anyway, she thought. But as an investor at the venture capital firm Lux Capital who specializes in women's health, Shakir vaguely recalled hearing that if you have a headache when you're postpartum, you should take your blood pressure. She dug up a blood pressure cuff she'd bought for her parents in the height of COVID. "My blood pressure was literally off the chart," she recalls.
She kept taking her blood pressure over and over, certain something must be wrong with the device; she'd never had high blood pressure readings before, including during her first two pregnancies. She made a telehealth appointment for 10 minutes later via Maven, the unicorn women's health startup in which she'd been an early investor. At the same time, she texted Neel Shah, the company's chief medical officer. "He said, 'This is a true emergency,'" she remembers.
Shakir's husband had been outside assembling a stroller for their first walk with their new baby. Instead, they got in the car and drove to the labor and delivery ward Shakir had just left, rather than risk wasting time in triage at a new emergency room. There, healthcare providers diagnosed her with postpartum preeclampsia, a life-threatening condition in which blood pressure rises to dangerous levels following birth, usually within 48 hours but sometimes as much as six weeks later. They hooked her up to an IV, where she received blood pressure medication and a magnesium drip. She learned the headache was caused by fluid in her brain and shortness of breath by fluid in her chest.
Shakir stayed in the hospital for five days; it took three days for her blood pressure to stabilize. If she'd arrived 30 minutes later, a nurse told her, she'd likely have had a fatal stroke.
She almost couldn't believe that after spending years becoming an expert in women's health, she'd come so close to dying after childbirth. Without a chief medical officer from a $1.35 billion startup on speed dial, she didn't know what would have happened. "I live in a bastion of privilege and I have access to information and really good care," she says. "And I was still close to death so many times throughout this process."
For Shakir, the experience reinforced why she invests in women's health companies like the biotech company Gameto and the AI-driven fertility startup Alife; another major investment of hers is Summer Health, a pediatric telehealth startup. "A lot of my investments are trying to democratize everyone to have access to healthcare in your pocket," she says. "In this case, it's literally the difference between life and death."
Postpartum preeclampsia is not well understood; doctors don't know its cause. It was last in the headlines when Olympic runner Tori Bowie died from complications after childbirth, possibly related to preeclampsia or eclampsia. "It's why we need to keep talking about it, it's why we need to put more money into it," Shakir says. "We need to figure out why these things are happening and make these solutions more accessible."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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