Sickle Cell and Me

I was sick a couple of days ago, and I wanted to write about it because I've never really talked about it, but I've got an illness called Sickle Cell. Its not something I talk to people about much and I try not to think about it until I have to, when I get sick. Its not something you would notice about me if I didn't tell you, because most of the time its not an issue, but I've had it all my life.

Most people would never even have heard of it but Sickle Cell is a genetic illness that some people from certain regions of the world get. I'm not going to explain completely what it is here to save time, and because to be honest I'm not sure I understand it properly myself. There's a charity called the Sickle Cell Society that can explain it better than I ever could.

What it means for me is sometimes I get sick; maybe every few months I might start feeling a lot of pain (I mean a lot, it really, really hurts). A lot of the time this starts in the afternoon or evening, small at first, with only a bit of pain that I try to ignore and hope will go away. Sometimes it does go away, which is great! Sometimes it doesn't though and steadily just gets worse. When I was a kid, these episodes would lead to me having to go to hospital and stay there for anything from a few days to several weeks. Luckily I seem to be doing better now I'm older and a hospital visit hasn't happened for a long time.

It usually gets worse for me in the night when I'm trying to get to sleep. Because it hurts so much though, its really hard to get any sleep, and sometimes I end up not being able to sleep until the afternoon or evening of the next day. During those hours sleep is pretty much all I want, because I'm so tired and because it offers an escape from the pain.

Having Sickle Cell I get prescribed some pretty powerful pain pills for times like this and I find myself necking them to try and stop the pain. Sometimes they work first time, and sometimes I have to take a few doses over some hours. I can tell you there's nothing worse than having to wait another six hours to take more pills because the ones you just took haven't worked and you're still in a huge amount of pain. Luckily, one side effect of these pills is they make me feel sleepy, so that sometimes helps me get to sleep before the Sun comes up.

Getting sick usually means I have to stay in bed, and all I want to do is sleep. A lot of the time I can't even bring myself to eat, and I'll pretty much sleep all day and then all night as well, helped by the pain pills, or morphine if I'm in hospital. 

One thing about getting sick is it does give me some clarity, things that I would have been stressing over a couple of hours before don't seem that important when I just want to not be in pain any more. Also, perhaps because of all the pain pills, or maybe because of the euphoria of feeling better, I do feel amazingly zen when the pain starts to go away, like nothing that I've been stressing about could be that bad, which is one good side to the whole Sickle Cell thing.

So that's my relationship with Sickle Cell, its a part of me and my life, and its made me who I am today, but I don't let it define me.