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She said she and her sister were given various concoctions to drink every day with the assurance that if they drank it religiously, they would be cured of the illness they were inflicted with. “For two years, my sister and I went through this charade but all to no avail. Luckily, my father had insisted we continue taking the supplements recommended at the hospital and one day, he threw away the concoctions given to us by the prophet,” she said.
Ogunleye added that the disease took a toll on her because she was always falling sick and could not do what every young child could comfortably do. “Try as hard as my parents did to make life comfortable and normal for my sister and me, we always knew we were not like other children and had to be careful with the kind of activities we engaged in,” she said.
He said, “That is not the case with me, it was pure ignorance given the year and place I was born and grew up in. However, I have long stopped blaming my parents. I did pretty much when I was younger, especially when going through heart-rending pain. My wife is AA so my son is free. But playing a fatherly role is not easy, especially now that I have physical restrictions. I cannot lift my son when he runs to me in excitement.
Afolabi said in her final year in high school, she had another crisis when one of her teachers caned her. “I was hospitalised for a month in the hospital. I was later diagnosed with Avascular Necrosis of the hips and that was in 2008. Since then, I have been both a sickle cell and AVN patient. I have terrible pain in my legs and I limp. I attended university with this diagnosis. The leg pains increased and I had to walk with the aid of a walking stick.
He said, “I started to do sickle cell advocacy work while I was still a student at a polytechnic through a non-governmental organisation, ‘Help a sickle child foundation’ which later changed to ‘Oladipupo Foundation for Sickle Cell.’ I took it upon myself to work more with people living with sickle cell in rural areas seeing as there is a large vacuum of information and misinformation cum myths attached to the disease in such areas.
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