Find out how Pat doesn’t let his hemophilia hold him back from experiencing life and new things.
My name is Pat. I’m 30 years old and I have hemophilia.
When I was young, we lived in a really rural area so it was really hard for us to get medication and to be able to do home infusion.
At one point, my parents took me to see this certain doctor, a hematologist, and the doctor told my parents that I shouldn’t be riding a bicycle because I was a young kid with hemophilia, and that I shouldn’t. It was too dangerous to ride a bicycle.
Luckily for me my parents were smart enough to say, “No, you know what, I think every kid deserves to be able to ride a bike”.
Had my parents made different decisions, there would have been a lot of experiences that I had that I wouldn’t have necessarily had the opportunity to say, “Yeah, I’ve done that. Yeah, I’ve snowboarded down a mountain.” No, no hemophiliac was ever told to do that back in the day. That was something unheard of.
Get out there and take it all the way up to where you’re comfortable. It just shows me that, yeah, I have some limitations but I can still go do these things or experience these things, even if it seemed crazy to the doctors or to my parents when I was younger. At least I can say, “Yeah I’ve gone and done it”, I guess that’s part of it too.
Dealing with hemophilia, it really gives you a better idea of just what you can accomplish if you push through the pain and if you just stick with it, you can really do all the same things as everyone else, you can live your life to the fullest and really enjoy your life.
Don’t let the hemophilia determine who you are; don’t let that define your life. You have to manage it but you don’t have to let it be who you are.
That would be my message.
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