Personal Narrative: Sickle Cell Anemia

My mother always told me to watch who you sleep with i used to just laugh at her and take it as a joke until i got older and truly realized what she was trying to say. My mom and my dad both had a trait of sickle cell so in result i was produced with the full disease. However even when i was younger always known what i wanted out of life. I had the big dream of becoming a doctor ever since I was little. Its probably because i spent most of my young life in hospitals although some might hate being in them i enjoy it. I was diagnosed with Sickle Cell Anemia since birth so i've really adapted and grown up with it. I did have one other dream when i was younger though, i wanted to be a professional football player that was my dream for a long time until one day , i had to go to the doctor, and they told me that I could not play anymore

because my heart could not take the strain i was putting on it they said i could have died if i continued to play so my dream was crushed in that moment. It took me a couple of years to get over that dream i sometimes still feel like i should go tryout and play again even against the doctors orders.I have had many trips to the hospital so I began to ask questions to learn more about the type of treatment that was being provided and what they would do to me.

I remember this older doctor when i was in a hospital he was trying to put in an I.V. in my hand and he could not find the vein and he kept poking my vein with the needle continuously and it caused the vein in my hand to stick out more and to not look the same as the rest. I was already loopy from the previous medications they had given me but I was with my grandma that day and i thought i was going to die i looked over and told her in a sobbed type voice “he's going to kill me.” she just looked at me and laughed but at the time i was serious. I always missed a lot of school time throughout the school years because of trips to the hospital but i usually stayed on top of my work up until i got into highschool is when it became harder to not be in school and still be able to understand what was going on in school while i was

out. Sickle cell really has made highschool a harder challenge than it ever could have been. My freshman year was the first time in a long time that i didn't really miss more than a week of school in an entire year which is a lot for me and that year was probably the best i have done in school that was the year when i had all A's and i had one B. Sickle cell has effected me a lot in my life but i can not speak for the entire society i have not been everywhere to truly know what other communities think and feel but in my hometown i feel as if it's a hidden disease that is solely forgotten and not really talked about. I say this because i have been to numerous amounts of hospitals all around in my area and only a few actually know what the disease is and even fewer know what to do or how to treat it. There were a couple of incidents where i went to the hospital in complete pain and agony and the doctors did not know how to treat it or what to do with it so they came to the conclusion that i was faking and that i was not really in any type of pain. They tried to portray me as if i was just a young teen drug addict who was trying to make up a chronic illness in order to get medications and honestly i hate taking the medicines they prescribe me if there was another way to get rid of the burning,throbbing sensations of pain i feel i would gladly choose an alternative. Now of course this is not what the doctors told me directly ,but like i said i have been in and around hospitals my whole life and i know when something is and is not right. So they would send me home in pain forcing me to find other home remedies to ease my pain through trial and error and what i found was icy hot, heating pads and anything heat related to keep me warm typically works for me.