Ahmed, Mayowa Shukura has been a known healthy HBSS patient from her early years and because we detected it early, we have been able to manage her condition very well with mild and in rare cases minor crisis.
She has always been a lively person and was never known to be down for more than a day when she had crisis situation.
She went through her education stages without medical issues and graduated from the University of Lagos but after graduation she seemed to have more frequent cases of hospital visits with Ulcer being the diagnosis most times and no more bone crisis.
Hence, we began to manage Ulcer in LASUTH. In early 2015, the visit became more frequent and she did series of tests as required by the consultants; from blood tests to multiple endoscopies to CT Scans, Abdominal scans and a whole lot of others.
By July 2015, the ulcer as it was diagnosed, became worse as it had progressed from pangs to vomiting and stooling blood so frequently. She was always on admission every other week and we spent so much on bills for the drugs and maintenance. We had to watch what she ate and drank. She started to lose weight as she would be unable to eat anything when the vomiting starts. Meanwhile any time the ulcer comes due to the stress, it always resulted to bone crisis, implying that we spend two weeks treating ulcer and the another week treating the crisis.
And as the year ran out, we spent more time on hospital admissions and more frequently. At this point, our confident in LASUTH was not firm anymore because it just wasnt working and we were not getting enough care so we tried another place- Isolo General Hospital as we knew a Management Doctor there. It was fine for a few days but then we went back to status quo.
By this time, we went to other private clinics too near our home as emergencies come especially in the night. She began to have more crisis along with the ulcer, her body began to change and due to the crisis, she began to take more pain relieving IVs, she reacted to so much and she got stuck on pentacosine.
By December, we were really worried that this is beyond being an HBSS and all the hospitals kept discharging us after a few days.
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