“When we first moved, I had to educate the principal and the teachers because they didn’t even know really what sickle cell was. A lot of the kids would be like, what is sickle cell? Why do you have to go to the hospital? The students didn’t understand why my kids were sick all the time, why they was missing so much school, why they had to be in the hospital and they didn’t know what sickle cell was. Because sickle cell is really not known, it’s not popular like cancer, everybody knows what cancer is. I think it’s sad that nobody really talks about sickle cell like they do heart disease, leukemia, cancer, different other diseases. You hear so much about other diseases, but you don’t hear much about sickle cell.”
“What I would like to see — and I’m pretty sure everybody with sickle cell will agree with me — if we can get somebody to sponsor a commercial. They always sponsoring different things nationwide for cancer, but they don’t do that for sickle cell.” – Oral, mom of 2 adult children with sickle cell