Cheril Wilson Smith’s daughter was in excruciating pain from sickle cell disease when she brought her into an area emergency department needing urgent treatment.
“I just figured when you go into the ER, doctors would know about that,” Wilson Smith said. “But I’ll never forget how I felt when the doctor asked me if I was sure that she had sickle cell. A doctor in the ER was very reluctant to aggressively treat the pain and so we ended up being in so much more pain than we needed to be for a longer period of time.”