A Sickle Cell Sufferer's Guide, Part 3

You were having a normal day. Or maybe, you were having the greatest day of your life.  Maybe it was the worst in a long series of bad ones, and you'd been pushing yourself too hard.  In any case, there was that just-one-whatever-too-many moment, and the slight disorientation kicked in.  Your day as you knew it is now over.  You look up, yanked entirely out of whatever moment you were in, and turn your attention inward.

I was fifteen, just into my second semester of tenth grade at a new school, less than a month before my first musical theater performance on a new stage, when a layup instigated one of the worst Sickle Cell crises I've ever had.  It was a shot of perfect form - left to right under the hoop, ball over the shoulder, finger roll, nothing but net; when I landed, there was that spasm, that slight nausea, that "Uh-oh."

Maybe it's entirely specific to each of us, what we experience physically in that moment, but the "Uh-oh" is not. Neither are the emotions.  The older we get, the more emotions we attach to our bouts with this bastard.  (Y'know, the illegitimate offspring of crappy hemoglobin genes and...okay so it's possible to take a metaphor too far.) Those emotions are overwhelmingly negative, and often serve to make dealing with an active pain crisis even more difficult.

But, like those embattled nurses at the ER, you must triage, so the emotions are either stuffed, shoved aside, or otherwise allowed to fester while you deal with the immediate threat.  Beg off of whatever you were doing - no matter how important it was, your most important responsibility is to get home, horizontal, hydrated and medicated quickly.  Get ahead of this sucker, cut it off at the pass.  Take Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, and a couple liters of Arrowhead to the side of your bed and prepare for the madness.

Do you remember being told that, in the event of a nuclear attack, you should get under your desk?  Because if we're all going, it's nice to have something over your head turn to ash before you do...or perhaps just get fatally irradiated first.  I know that's essentially what I'm suggesting; we both know that in the event of a major crisis, you might as well take Pez, M&Ms, and Reese's Pieces with your water and enjoy the sugar rush - if you can feel it around the blinding agony.  But sometimes, the crisis is minor and knocked out with a little OTC TLC, so we'll try that first.

Let's assume that doesn't work.  You know what the next step is; when you decide to take it is entirely individual.  My concern is usually to end the crisis as quickly as possible, once I know my over-the-counter friends aren't going to save me from my personal Fat Man.