Thomas Graham, a hemophilia patient advocate, shares how lingering pain and joint damage continue to affect quality of life long after bleeds are treated.
Transcript
The pain, the discomfort. You know, the leftover pain, especially after you have a bleed and it gets treated.
The discomfort, the hurt doesn’t go away right away. It’s not like morphine. It doesn’t make everything wonderful.
Dealing with that pain, that discomfort, has always been the hardest part for me, and I don’t have as many bleeds now this late in life, but I’m dealing now with the residual pain: The arthritis, the joint damage that has built up over time. That really, for me, is the quality of life that has mattered the most.
I got used to the prohibitions, the things that I couldn’t do from a very young age. So that hasn’t mattered as much, but the aftereffects matter.
