WSSU Senior Avery Hubbard: Living With Sickle Cell Please play in HD! Avery Hubbard wanted to be a doctor at an early age before changing her goal to be a laboratory researcher focused on eradicating major diseases, a change she felt was the result of a predestined career journey that started very early in life -- a common theme among a number of the approximately 1,100 undergraduate and graduate students participating in Winston-Salem State University’s (WSSU) 2014 Commencement on Friday, May 16, at 9:45 a.m., Bowman Gray Stadium, 1250 South Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. Hubbard’s story perhaps captures the perseverance, predestination and jubilation of her classmates as commencement will symbolize a major step in their journey. Hubbard, a clinical laboratory science major from Indianapolis, IN, and a career honor student who has maintained a 3.9 GPA at WSSU is especially qualified and motivated for her impending career. It may be fate that predetermined her path at birth. That’s when it was discovered she has sickle cell anemia. The disease is an inherited form of anemia — a condition in which there isn’t enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen throughout your body. There is no cure and long-term effects of sickle cell include episodes of intense pain lasting from hours to weeks, frequent body infections including organs and bones, and possible growth and vision problems. While a WSSU student, Hubbard’s small-statured body has suffered all of those. But she managed to miss very few classes and she keeps focus of her goals. Fortunately, blindness acquired during a hospital stay was temporary. Her infected left shoulder was replaced during Christmas break to reduce lost class time. Hospital stays for pain have been limited to two weeks. The pain is still intense and during a pain episode her sophomore year, Hubbard received a cocktail of Tylenol with codeine, Vicodin, and morphine. Her pain was reduced to moderate only after receiving IV medicine at the hospital. She also has been taking a powerful chemotherapy drug since an early age to decrease hospital stays. “Through all of this I try my best to not miss school because my studies and career goals are really important to me, Hubbard said. “Even as a child, I was fortunate enough to go to a children’s hospital where I was tutored in my room while being treated.” Hubbard has maintained a determination instilled in her by her mother and deceased grandmother to “never let the disease stop her from accomplishing anything in life.” And when she’s “feeling down because I can’t do what others can,” people appear in her life to steer her back on course, such as her middle school nurse who told her when she sees herself in the mirror she should see an accomplished and talented person, and not merely someone with sickle cell. There was also the TV commercials she saw as a child featuring a your girl saying, “don’t let sickle cell get you down.” Hubbard later learned the girl died. One day during her junior year of college she walked into a research lab and knew it was her destiny to perform research to eradicate sickle cell and other diseases. Hubbard, who interned previously at the Center for Disease Control CDC, will complete a summer internship at the National Institutes for Health after graduation. She hopes to get hired at the CDC.
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 14:57:07 +0000
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