NEED TO KNOW
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Rafiya Sherin said EMTs accused her of “pretending” to be dizzy before blood tests revealed she had severe aplastic anemia, a rare and potentially fatal blood disorder
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Her other symptoms included fatigue and gastrointestinal distress
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She now relies on regular blood transfusions and has been told she needs a stem cell transplant in order to live a normal life
A woman says medical professionals accused her of faking symptoms after she fell ill at work, but she was ultimately diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly blood disease.
Rafiya Sherin of Preston, England, said her health struggles began when she came down with food poisoning while on vacation abroad, according to local news outlet LancsLive and the BBC.
Sherin, 30, who is originally from India, said her symptoms — which included fatigue, dizziness and diarrhea — did not improve after she returned to the U.K., prompting her to visit her doctor.
“I asked for a blood test, which [my doctor] agreed to, even though he thought the diarrhea was making me tired and that the dizziness was from a muscle spasm in my shoulder. We agreed that I’d come in the next week for a blood test,” she said while speaking to LancsLive.
She said she continued to feel extremely unwell for the next several days, and her co-workers even ended up calling an ambulance while she was at her office because she felt so ill.
Manchester Royal Infirmary in England
Credit: google maps
However, Sherin claims that the EMTs who arrived told her she was merely dehydrated and did not need to be taken to a hospital — and that they questioned whether she was actually experiencing symptoms.
“They even said I was pretending that I was dizzy, and I felt embarrassed,” Sherin told the outlet.
However, she said she ultimately got her scheduled blood test two days later, at which point her doctor called and told her to get to a hospital “immediately.”
Shortly after, Sherin was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, an extremely rare blood disorder in which a person’s bone marrow does not make enough new blood cells.
The condition leaves patients prone to infections and uncontrolled bleeding and can be fatal, per the Mayo Clinic.
Sherin now needs regular blood transfusions to survive and was told that she will ultimately need a stem cell transplant in order to return to her normal life.
However, the marketing manager and travel enthusiast said she soon learned that finding a stem cell match was going to be much more challenging than she anticipated: only about 7% of all eligible U.K. citizens are signed up to be stem cell donors — and of those people, only 16% are people of Sherin’s ethnic background, making the likelihood of a match even lower, according to the UK-based blood disease charity DKMS in a statement to PEOPLE.
“I never knew there was only a little amount of ethnic minority donors,” Sherin said in a statement to the BBC.
“I always talk about cultural representation but that was a shocking revelation for me,” she added.
Sherin, who calls herself an “extraverted, people person” during a filmed segment on BBC’s North West Tonight, said that finding a match would give her “a second chance at life.”
“I would be indebted to [the donor] forever,” she said.
Sherin’s friends have since organized a stem cell registration drive through DKMS in an attempt to find her a match.
Sherin described the drive, which took place on Aug. 16 as “incredible” in a social media post following the event.
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“As an immigrant living far away from home, there are days when you realize you hardly even know 200 people in this country. And yet, 200-plus people showed up on a Sunday, during the school holidays, simply because they cared,” she wrote in the post.
“You didn’t just register as potential stem cell donors. You gave someone like me living through a blood disorder or blood cancers something that can sometimes feel so difficult to find, HOPE !” she continued.
“You reminded me that even when you are far away from home, community can find you wherever you are,” Sherin added.
Read the original article on People