… diagnosis that I hadn’t expected and had lived my life. Uh, I ran track and field. I was an athlete in college, so I had never had any experiences similar to my sisters where I had debility, pain or, or trouble with breathing or anything like that. So I never had any symptoms. So has the trait, what it means is that I’m a carrier of the disease. It means that I have to, or sometimes I feel like I have to introduce myself to guys and say, hi, my name is Christina, I have the trait. How about you? Um, and another thing that it brought to mind for me was that perhaps there are degrees, um, to the quality of testing that exists for sickle cell. So when I speak to people about having the trait I, and they say, oh, I was tested, I was negative. I said, well, when were you tested? Because I was tested when I was three and I came up negative. So have you been tested again? You should check it out. Um, so that, that’s part of the advocacy I do is, is try to get people to make sure that they don’t have the trait. Because as a carrier, you can go without any type of symptoms, but then you could get together and have a child with someone and then they could end up with sickle cell and growing up and seeing what my sister experienced with sickle cell. I never want to bring a child into this world knowingly that could have sickle cell disease.
I Am My Sisters Keeper: A Sickle Cell Story
by Blackdoctor
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