Blood and its health impacts
My true life experience
Obinna Mba, +2347062277242
Good day to whom is reading this story. Life is worth living and living it to its fullest. By this, I mean explore all good possible means to enjoy life no matter what situation you are trapped in.
However, sometimes I feel some kind of limitation to explore life to its fullest, but as human, you’ll have this extreem satisfaction as you desire of it: good health, lovely friendship, marital bliss, great social participation, standard education, mind blowing sex life and the list is countless. Well, let me introduce you to the head that writes this piece.
I am Obinna Vincent Mba, my friends call me Vinci and I’ve lived with the symptoms of sickle cell disease as long as I could remember and those. Life satisfaction I mentioned earlier, I’ve had difficulties in enjoying them because I have this notion of what my health status is BUT I pressed on because of some influences, both from my dad and peers. Now I’m writing this piece to tell what the impact of blood is to me as SCD patient.
I never will forget the days we (I mean my two younger brothers, of which one is passed away, and I) frequently stormed The Lagos University Teaching Hospital(LUTH) Idiaraba, Lagos, Nigeria, for treatment and clinic check up and how we(three of us as tender as 2,5,7years) are put in the same bed for anemia and our dad run north, south, east and west searching for how to get blood so we can survive. My dad always says: “….a nurse told me, people who have one don’t survive the trouble of sickle cell, much-less three children. And yes, digressing, I told you one of us passed away. After growing up as a young man he one day complained to me that he has something like a pimples at the ankle part of his leg which turned into a small sour or wound and later degenerated to a larger wound. After trying to see a physician in a government hospital in Lagos we resulted a self medication treatment of same kind of drugs prescribed that helps fight germs and infection. One of the drugs is Ciprotab. He was a handsome looking young man but started to get lin due to too many drugs without a complement of blood tonic, since it is said that SCD patients don’t take drugs containing iron. There were no much blood building drugs and Astymin is quite not really affordable to us. on fridaay morning I travelled to Owerri, Imo State for an interview, my hopes were that I got the job and then ask him to stop the menial job he does and I’ll pay him 10 000 naira every month so the wound could heal. On Sunday midnight at about 4am my phone rang and it was my other younger brother telling me Chimezie was at Kiladejo Hospital; that he was in crisis. I heard the pain-cry of my kid yearning for life even while the other was on the phone with me. He dropped the call in less than one minute and I became more scared, the pain-cry was so resounding in my ear then and now that I write this; like a transformation was taking place. So when called him back, he uttered the words: “brother Obinna Chimezie don die.” T’was as if hell was let lose on me. I cried out to the street and saw the spirit of madness staring at me in the face. That moment was a heart-aching-psycho-derailing experience I’m yet to be free from. Everything in the world became useless to me until now. Exactly a week before his demise, he had told me to take care of our brother and dad when he lives but I wasn’t scared because I had the faith if I were with him he won’t die. Don’t think I’m thinking like God now but the devil tricked me to travel for a course I thought was just and then he struck. It was low blood count the doctor said and there were no place no find blood at the midnight when the crisis started. I lost my FRIEND and brother to low blood count.
On that hospital when three of us were laid and dad running around for blood to donate, we survived because blood was available as it was in the day. We lived and still lives with the notion that blood was the fuel that run our body system. Let there be a system that checks what blood group when a child is born, have the full health profile of that child and run it like the Bank Verification Number(BVN) in Nigeria. Let donors never give up on saving lives with their donation for they are heroes and will never be quantified with material payment. Let them keep do good work going.