Living between the moments: insights into Sickle Cell Disease

If being a black woman working in a predominantly white male industry, feeling she has to continually prove herself wasn’t enough of a daily challenge, Afiyah Chohollo also lives with the unpredictability of Sickle Cell Disease. In this episode she shares so many insights into what life is like for her and other sufferers, including the impact of the disease on mental health, career and choice of partner. A disease primarily contracted by people of Afro-Carribean descent who live in a colder climate than their ancestors would have done and often triggered by being cold, the frequency and intensity of the crises sufferers experience Afiya Chohollo is VP of Engineering & Technical Program Management at a global iTechnology company, leading specialist engineering teams that are responsible for core platform infrastructure, test engineering, and scaling product and technology execution to use digital identity to verify access to millions of people. She is technical advisor at CloudFO, an early stage company building intelligent software that keeps businesses from running out of cash. Also a Governor at Copthall School, Afiya has appeared in a recent publication Voices of the Shadows highlighting the careers of 51 Women in tech which was distributed to 300 UK schools. https://uk.linkedin.com/in/afiya-chohollo-56a0b15b @theprojectgram on instagram https://www.sicklecellsociety.org/ About the host Rachel Maunder Rachel Maunder is a Story Coach, helping people find and craft their personal stories for greater engagement through speaking. Her secret sauce includes a blend of an ability to spot the key parts of a story and to highlight those in a relatable way, a lifelong curiosity around what makes people different and a gentle way of drawing people’s stories out of them. An advocate and ally of acceptance and inclusion of those who seem different to us, in whatever way, and you start to see Rachel’s motivation behind creating The Other Stories Podcast. Rachel coaches individuals and runs bespoke workshops for organisations. She also offers an online home-study programme using her own StoryCRAFT process. You can find her contact details or book a complimentary exploratory call here: https://www.rachelmaunder.com/links DISCLAIMER Any views, thoughts and opinions shared and expressed in this podcast belong solely to the host and guest speakers. Please carry out your own due diligence.