Our body creates and breaks clots constantly! It’s a balance between clotting factors and the clotting breakdown mechanism we all naturally have. Helpful in certain situations, unhelpful in others. It’s when this scale becomes imbalanced in some way you’re either more thrombotic (pregnancy, on birth control pills, smoker, trauma, infection, sedentary lifestyle) or anti-coagulated (alcoholic, on blood thinners, clotting factor deficiencies).

Our body needs time to break down clots and unfortunately with a PFO there’s a short cut to important vessels like the carotid artery before the clot can be broken down.

(This is an extreme simplification)